U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wants you to think he’s good at math.
For a few weeks, Johnson basked in the media spotlight as one of a handful of possible Republican holdouts who might not vote for President Donald Trump’s disastrous budget bill in the U.S. Senate. Alas, the hope that Johnson would stand up to Trump was always flimsy at best.
At a Milwaukee Press Club event on May 28, Johnson somberly denounced the House version of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which was projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national deficit. “We’re talking about mortgaging our kids’ future,” he intoned.
On July 1, Johnson voted in favor of the Senate’s version of the bill, which is projected to add $3.3 trillion to the deficit. So much for the Senate’s self-appointed “numbers guy.”
Johnson claims that he voted for the bill because Trump Administration officials promised him they would rein in spending. He says that balancing the budget and reducing the federal deficit are his top concerns. But the numbers don’t lie: Johnson voted to blow up the deficit in order to please Trump and maintain historic tax cuts for the very rich.
To be fair, the Senator has never cared about the dire effects of legislation that will cause almost 60,000 people in his home state to lose health care coverage through cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. He was unmoved by the proposal in the House version of the bill that will cut food aid for two million children living in poverty in the United States. The only way to reduce deficits, he said, was to enact even deeper cuts than House Republicans had passed—increasing hunger, undermining education, and rolling back health care—because he’s totally unwilling to increase revenue with even modest tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. Those cuts to federally funded programs, not a deficit that could be resolved by making the rich pay their share of taxes, are the real threat to our children’s future.
“I’m just a guy from Oshkosh who’s trying to save America,” Johnson said, patting himself on the back at the Press Club event. He recapped, in heroic terms, his lone stand against the 2017 tax cut for America’s top earners, which he blocked until he was able to work in a special loophole that benefited him personally. Later, he bragged that the version of the budget bill he voted for would make those tax cuts permanent.
Against the wishes of voters, who have become increasingly alarmed by the GOP budget plan as they learn more about it, Johnson threatened to block the bill unless he saw deeper cuts. And he got them.
The Senate bill was passed on July 3 and cuts Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion, compared to $800 billion in the original House version. It makes deeper cuts to safety net programs for immigrants who live and work in the United States lawfully, canceling Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage for refugees, asylees, and victims of human trafficking and domestic violence, including children. Compounding the damage in the House version of the bill, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, it also takes away Medicare, Affordable Care Act tax credits, and food assistance from those groups.
To reiterate: The Senate version is more expensive. It drives deficits higher than the House version, even as it makes crueler cuts to food assistance and health care for the nation’s most vulnerable.
“While the bill is a step forward, we have only just begun the difficult task of reducing spending, and there is still a long way to go,” Johnson said in a statement after casting his vote. “A rigorous effort will soon be announced to review every program and every line of the federal budget, looking for ways to reduce spending to a reasonable prepandemic level. I look forward to being fully involved in that effort to put America on a path to fiscal sustainability.”
Good luck making that U-turn after exploding the deficit.
The dire truth is that the destruction of the social safety net, the environment, clean energy infrastructure, and other social goods by Republicans hell-bent on handing out giant tax breaks to the wealthy will take generations to reverse. And the unnecessary austerity Republicans are imposing is going to hurt rural Trump voters as much or more than it will hurt urban-dwelling Democrats.
Johnson, like most of his Republican colleagues, is betting that he can do massive damage to the people he represents without paying a political price. We’ll see how that turns out.
Besides giving billionaires an income boost, another major priority in the Republican budget is fueling a new prison industrial complex for the immigrants that the Trump Administration is rounding up and trying to deport without due process. Massive new spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) makes the immigration police force the largest law enforcement agency in the United States, bigger than the militaries of most nations. The $170 billion allocated to ICE includes tens of billions of dollars to more than double the number of immigrant detention centers and expand the capacity of existing detention centers—a windfall for private prison operators—as well as a huge surge in staffing.
We have all seen the videos of masked ICE agents conducting raids, seizing farmworkers, landscapers, and fast-food workers, and disappearing people who clearly are not the “hardened criminals” Trump claims they are.
The persecution of immigrants in the United States is based on a whopping lie that “illegal” immigrants are “invading” our country, committing crimes, stealing American jobs, and costing money by taking advantage of safety net programs. All of these claims are demonstrably false.
The farmers, builders, and hotel and restaurant managers who depend heavily on immigrant workers know this. They are the ones driving unauthorized immigration with their demand for workers to do hard jobs for low pay that U.S. citizens don’t want to do. Those immigrant workers commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens. They paid almost $97 billion in taxes in 2022, about $26 billion into a Social Security system they cannot access, $6 billion for Medicare, and $1.8 billion to an unemployment insurance program they can never use.
Lately, as anti-immigrant hype and scary ICE raids have ramped up, I’ve been in touch with a dairy farmer I know in Wisconsin—one of the few who is willing to talk publicly about his industry’s heavy reliance on immigrants who can’t get visas to work here legally, and about how much he respects and appreciates those workers.
Since there have been no raids on dairy farms in Wisconsin so far, he told me recently, his workers are continuing to go to work, go out, and live their lives as they have for many years. Unlike the farmworkers in Texas, who have been staying in their homes, afraid to work in the fields after ICE raids there, the undocumented immigrants who do 70 percent of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms continue to pull long days keeping the state’s marquee industry going.
“Our employees show no sign of concern,” he told me. He had just returned from playing golf with the Mexican-born employee who is the right-hand man on his farm to watch a soccer match among a bunch of other Mexican workers.
That might sound bizarre given the number of videos of terrifying raids filling social media feeds. But it’s also a testament to the fact that immigrant workers are deeply embedded in and crucial to rural Midwestern places.
The fictions Republicans are peddling to justify their policies of greed, destruction, and oligarchy clash with the everyday experience of a lot of people in our country—including Republican voters. Even Trump himself half-acknowledged this, claiming that he wanted to help the farmers and hotel owners who are losing employees they rely on and care about to ICE raids.
My farmer friend told me about calls he’s had with members of the administration that demonstrate the rift between the Stephen Miller lock-’em-all-up wing of the administration and the heads of agencies including Agriculture, Labor, and even Homeland Security, who understand they will crash the economy if they deport all the undocumented workers who keep the U.S. economy running.
We need to hang on to reality in order to push back against the ugliness, racism, and wanton destruction engulfing our country. We need to avoid being swept away by the online outrage machine and keep hold of some basic, grounding truths. We are all human. We are all essentially in the same boat. We need to remember that and pull together.