House Passes Bill To Add Trillions To National Debt
By John J. Duncan Jr.
Several years ago I was sitting on the floor of the U.S. House when there was a vote on whether to increase the national debt limit by another trillion dollars.
I heard a friend of mine, a congressman from the northwest, say to someone else, “I wouldn’t vote for this bill, but I have to because I am a chairman.”
I remember thinking to myself at the time, there is no chairmanship worth forcing me to vote for a bill I don’t think is right.
I had a framed quote on the wall of my Knoxville office. The quote is from a 1930 novel by Janet Ayer Fairbank called “The Lion’s Den” about a fictional congressman named Zimmer.
These words from that novel were very moving to me: “No matter how the espousal of a lost cause might hurt his prestige in the House, Zimmer had never hesitated to identify himself with it if it seemed to him to be right. He knew only two ways: the right one and the wrong, and if he made a mistake, it was never one of honor. He voted as he believed he should, and although sometimes his voice was raised alone on one side of a question, it was never stilled.”
Those words were given to me by a great libertarian author and columnist, Bill Kauffman, who lives in a small town in upstate New York. He had admired some of the votes I had cast and some of the things I had said and written while I was in the House.
I was one of the first members of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2016. I was a Trump delegate to the Republican Convention in 2024. I don’t like some of the things he has said and done, but even husbands and wives or best friends disagree sometimes.
I have voted for him all three times he has run. He has been very nice to me, and I like him personally. On most of the big issues, I agree with him, and even where I disagree, I understand why he has had to take the position that he has.
But I am very disappointed that he has forced almost all the Republicans in the House to vote for a bill that will raise the national debt by at least four trillion dollars. I don’t believe I could honestly feel I was a fiscal conservative if I had voted for a bill that did that.
From what I have heard and read, many Republicans did not want to vote for the bill. Many of them are good friends of mine, and I still hope they each get re-elected. All are better and more conservative than anyone the Democrats would nominate.
Believe me, I understand the pressure that can be applied, especially when the president is from your own party. That is why I have such great respect for the two Republicans who voted no on this bill – Thomas Massie (KY), and Warren Davidson (OH).
And I am pleased that several solid conservatives in the Senate are opposing certain provisions and trying to make the bill better. I understand that the administration has put members in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.
There are some good parts, and those who were forced to vote for it are trying to emphasize those parts. But this is trying to put lipstick on a pig. All the good parts could have been passed in separate bills that also had matching cuts in spending.
David Stockman, President Reagan’s budget director, wrote a lengthy analysis and said the bill actually will add over $5 trillion to the debt “because the so-called conservative party has lost its mind on the fiscal front.”
Elon Musk was even more outspoken. He shocked Washington last week by putting out this statement: “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: You know you did wrong.”
The Congressional Budget Office said this bill, under a best-case scenario, will move our national debt from almost $37 trillion where it is now to $59 trillion in 10 years. But this is only if the Trump tax cuts are eliminated.
Well, I and every Republican I know want the tax cuts to stay in effect. There simply should have been more spending cuts instead of adding more to the debt. This astounding amount of deficit spending over the last 25 or 30 years has been the primary cause of all the inflation that has seen some cars and trucks now cost as much as houses used to, and houses that now cost three or four times what they did just 10 years ago and are so unaffordable to most young families.
Hallerin Hill said on one of his programs that he doubted there was any member who read all 1,116 pages of this so-called “big beautiful bill.” Gigantic bills always have little things in them that could not pass on their own. Raising the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction to $40,000 per person means people in Tennessee and other low tax states will be subsidizing the high blue state taxes. Thankfully, some conservative senators are fighting to make this bill better.
