SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ (OBBB) — a GOP mega-bill more than 1,100 pages long — was a budget reconciliation bill that has now passed through Congress on party lines, and has been signed by the president.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was in the KELOLAND News studio Monday morning to talk about the legislation, its size and its passage.
After the bill first passed out of the U.S. House, two Republicans who voted for it — Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Mike Flood of Nebraska — admitted they had not actually read the bill, and said they would have opposed it it they had known what was in it.
Given the size of the bill, KELOLAND News asked Thune if he himself had read it, and whether he was confident that the Senate Republicans who voted for it had as well.
“Well yeah, I mean, we took a long time putting it together because you took the House product and we, like I said, we were working on this a long time ago on the Senate side, from our vantage point, about what we wanted to see in the bill,” Thune said in response. “The House gives us a bill, we take it, and we make some modifications to it.”
Passage of the bill by Senate Republicans was a somewhat quieter affair than it was when it first passed the House. Thune said threading the needle between those who wanted to cut more, and those who said too much was being cut was “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
That took a lot of meetings, he said.
“I did tons of meetings, individual meetings, senators, small group meetings, full, you know, conference meetings where we talked through each of the particular details and specifics in the bill,” said Thune.
Reconciliation mega-bills like the OBBB tend to be one-party exercises, Thune said, pointing out that they are often only possible because one party controls the House, Senate and White House. We asked Thune if he felt these bills are too large.
“That’s why initially I advocated a two-bill strategy where you break it down and do pieces so that you can focus more specifically,” said Thune. “The House believed — and the Speaker (U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson) made it very clear to me and to the president that they could only move one bill.”
Due to that insistence from Johnson, Thune said the Senate stuck with the House’s bill.
Thune also mentioned a discontentment with the process that allows for a budget reconciliation to pass the Senate with 51 votes rather than the traditional 60 needed to end debate.
“It’s always hard. It’s always complicated. I think it’s gotten more so in recent years,” Thune said. “Frankly, I’m not a fan of that. I mean, I think it’d be ideal if we could do things where we’re doing them in the traditional way at the Senate at 60 votes.”
Despite his reservations about the size and process by which the bill was passed, Thune remained pleased with the outcome, even backflipping to celebrate. “This was a generational — once in a generation kind of piece of legislation that we were able to get across the finish line,” he said.
