Sen. Markwayne Mullin Q&A: Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill

After narrowly passing in the House last month, the next step for the One Big, Beautiful Bill — the primary vehicle for President Trump's domestic agenda — is passage in the United States Senate, where Republicans have a 3-seat majority. Given that they are using the process known as reconciliation for this piece of legislation, they will not have to overcome a filibuster and thus would be able to pass it with a simple majority. Any changes that senators make to the bill, however, will need to be approved in the House. I asked Senator Mullin (R-OK) to discuss his expectations for the bill in an interview on Monday.

MULLIN: Well, we're going to pass this One Big, Beautiful Bill. We're going to get away from the Biden era policies, and we're going to move forward with the Trump era policies. This bill does a couple things. I mean, it doesn't balance our budget--we'd love for it to balance our budget, but it cuts $1.6 trillion in deficit spending now. You and I have been up here for a little while. Most times when we're talking about deficit spending, we're talking about ten-year deficit spending. This actually cuts $1.6 trillion in this fiscal year of deficit spending, that's unheard of. Keep in mind, with reconciliation, we only do two things: we do taxes and mandatory spending. So, discretionary spending, when we actually get into the appropriations process, we can actually do more cuts in the appropriation of the discretionary spending, Since we're in mandatory spending and we can't touch Social Security, that leaves us looking further at waste and fraud, especially in places like Medicaid. No one's going to actually lose their benefits that deserve to be on the program and those that should be qualified for it. What we're doing is we're taking the 6 million people that should never be on there. That means there's no ...health problems that keep them from working. there's no dependencies that's keeping them from working, and there's no excuses that's keeping them from working, other than they don't want to work. So, what we're saying is that the people that shouldn't be on there...6 million people on that program that can come off. We're getting a tremendous amount of cuts from that. We're making the tax policies permanent. So, all this rhetoric that the Democrats are saying that it's going to be, you know, a tax increase for the poor and a tax decrease for the billionaires -- that's absolutely a false lie. What we're doing is we're keeping the current policy permanent, because if we don't do anything, it expires and the average household is going to have a $1,400 a year increase in taxes. That's significant. So, I feel like we're going to get this thing passed. It's not going to be as quick -- It moves much slower over here in the Senate than it does the House. The House doesn't have to deal with the Byrd rule. We have to do it with that. And for your audience that's listening, the Byrd role is specific to us and it keeps us very narrow. So we can only use taxes and and mandatory spending. If it doesn't fit those two categories, then it gets kicked out, in what we call a scrubbing. So I call it the Byrd bath, right? It's getting a scrubbing. A prime example, Bernie Sanders one time tried to put a minimum wage increase. It got kicked out, and it wasn't allowed to be in reconciliation. Another time, the Democrats tried to do amnesty in it and it was also kicked out. Now, once it's kicked out and you choose to keep it on the bill, then it's no longer reconciliation, it's a budget bill and the threshold goes from 51 to 60. Well, we're not wanting to negotiate with the Democrats on this because their policies are much different than us, and so we got to make sure it fits within that narrow window of the Byrd rule and be at 51. So, we don't want to — we're not going to change the framework of the House bill, but we're going to have to maybe 'redecorate' some of the interior walls, and then what we change, we're going to lay on top of it and hopefully not have such big changes to it that the House can't accept. Two things we can't do, two things we can't change —we can't go below $1.6 trillion in deficit spending. Our goal is actually to get more deficit spending, so we want to increase it from $1.6 trillion to get as much as we can. If we can get to $2 trillion, we'll get 2 trillion. If we can get $1.8 trillion, we'll get 1.8, but we're not going to go below 1.6. And, number two, we can't change SALT (the cap on State and Local Tax deductions), even though there really isn't any senators in the Republican conference that has a SALT issue; that mainly deals with just blue states. It's still a sticking point on the House, so we're going we need to leave that completely alone, too. Other than that, we're gonna look at trying to put our fingerprints on it.

CAMERON: Some of your colleagues are concerned that this bill will actually increase the debt. Is this a concern for you?

MULLIN: Well, it does increase the debt, because we gotta increase the debt limit, we don't have a choice, right?

CAMERON: I mean, it increases the deficit, especially in the early years.

MULLIN: I think it depends on how you're looking at it. So, if you look at the tax cuts, that's what they're referring to. So, some of the tax cuts that are in there is, you know, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, and no tax on overtime. So, that is a revenue cost coming into the Treasury. However, if you actually see what happens is it spawns more spending in the economy, which turns into a growth in the economy, which actually increases the Treasury deposits, when they start coming in. So, you can look at it, but we see it — I'd rather grow the GDP by doing tax cuts than to try increasing it by holding — bringing more taxes into to Washington D.C. We don't spend well, but if you keep it in your hands and let you spend it and buy products the way you want to at home, and then we'll see it increase back to us, maybe we can be a little bit more responsible with the dollars from both directions. And so, I hear what my colleagues are saying. but we have two choices here — we either say, hey, we'd rather keep it at the level we are spending right now, because, by the time this bill comes to the floor, we've been negotiating this — everybody's got great ideas and I respect their ideas, but it's your idea, and since it's your idea, it's your job to get 51 votes on your idea. And if you can't get 51 votes on your idea, then it doesn't mean anything, because we got to get a bill that can get 51 votes here and get 218 and the House. So, by the time this comes to the floor, you only have two options. You don't have C, you have A or B. A, Trump era policies moving forward; B, say, 'You know what, I think Biden's era policies are better.' Now, try to explain that to the Republican base. So, let's negotiate. Let's talk about it. Let's get your ideas out there. We've been talking about this since November. But the end of the day, when the bill comes before, those are your two choices.

CAMERON: Is there anything in particular that you're wanting to see in the final bill?

MULLIN: We have been really hammering on the taxes. So, when you start talking about pass-throughs and either LLC's or S-Corps, that's our area that we really want to pay attention to. And so we've been holding true on that, not wanting, you know, when you start talking about corporate taxes and people says, you know, well, it's at 21 percent. That is 21 percent for C Corps., but they, at one time, they were talking about increasing the top earners, people earning over more than $450,000. Well, that sounds like a lot of money, if that's your paycheck. But if you're a small business owner, that's really not that much. I mean, a small business owner can make a half million dollars pretty easy, you know, with a few employees. And since it's a pass-through, that becomes your income. And so that's going to increase your rate, while C Corps still stay at 21. There needs to be a parity between the two; they don't have to be both at 21 because there is some benefits from being an S Corp LLC versus a C Corp., but they can't be too far apart because we still got to compete.