Republican South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, a leading fiscal hawk, is urging the Senate to think twice before it sends the House a budget bill that increases deficit spending or rolls back conservative policy wins secured in the initial House proposal.
Norman, who is considering running for the South Carolina governorship in 2026, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a Thursday interview that he cannot support the Senate’s proposal as currently written. The House Freedom Caucus member faulted the Senate plan for failing to maintain House-passed language accelerating the termination of green energy tax breaks enacted under former President Joe Biden and the elimination of a slew of deficit-reducing provisions that Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has struck from the bill.
“If they kick a lot of things out, it’s not going to pass over here,” Norman told the DCNF. “The bill we sent over there has got to come back, in large part, like it is or improve it.”
“I don’t see that happening,” Norman added.
Norman is joining a cohort of conservative House Republicans threatening to make the Senate proposal dead on arrival in the House. Many conservative Republicans are adamant that the upper chamber’s bill must not increase budget deficits and adhere to the House framework that paired tax cuts with reciprocal spending cuts.
Republican Texas Rep. Michael Cloud, also a Freedom Caucus member, told the DCNF Thursday that the Senate should course correct before passing a bill that could add up to $1 trillion more in deficit spending.
President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful” bill is currently under consideration in the Senate where Majority Leader John Thune is racing to hold a procedural vote on the upper chamber’s proposal as soon as Saturday. Trump has repeatedly demanded the bill on his desk by July 4.
The sweeping tax and immigration bill would permanently extend the president’s 2017 tax cuts that lowered federal income tax rates across the board, shield certain Americans from taxation on tipped wages and overtime pay and provide hundreds of billions in new funding for immigration enforcement and defense priorities.
Norman said he and his fellow conservatives are prepared to support a budget package mirroring the initial House-passed bill as long as it has a minimal to no increase on the deficit. That could be a tall hurdle as the Senate parliamentarian, an unelected official with massive influence in the upper chamber, strikes a spate of deficit-reducing proposals from the Senate proposal.
Norman is warning that House conservatives will not be jammed by the Senate to support a bill that significantly departs from the initial House product or substantially increases deficit spending.
“We [will] just play a game of hide and seek and kick it back,” Norman said. “It does not have the votes to pass.”
House conservatives have previously talked tough in fiscal fights over government funding and the initial House-passed bill only to back both measures after Trump got involved.
Norman voted for the House version of the bill, which passed the lower chamber on May 22. He chose to support the legislation following the House Freedom Caucus secured an array of conservative policy wins in the final bill. He voted against advancing an earlier version of the legislation in the House Budget Committee, citing insufficient reforms to Medicaid and green energy tax breaks.
The congressman told the DCNF that skeptics are wrong if they think he will swallow a budget package that increases budget deficits or rolls back green energy tax breaks so easily — even at the president’s urging.
“This is different than any other time,” Norman said. “When we’re looking to sign something into law, if it’s just another spending spree, that’s not fair to American people.”
“We’ve got an opportunity to get this country back, or start getting it back on a path of solvency,” Norman added.
Cloud similarly referred to the country’s $37 trillion debt as an “existential” threat to the long-term prosperity of the country.
“It is as much an existential crisis as you know some of the geopolitical things that President Trump has masterfully dealt with frankly,” Cloud said. “We can’t continue to do that [deficit spending].”
One area where House conservatives could feel more emboldened to pressure the Senate to adopt or exceed House-passed language is accelerating the termination of green energy tax breaks.
The president notably signaled his support for their immediate end of green energy tax credits during a post on the social media platform Truth Social Sunday, arguing “it is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!”
“That’s got to go,” Norman told the DCNF. “The President wants it to go. He wants to abolish all of them. We agree with that.”
The Senate’s draft plan, however, created more flexibility for the phase down of solar and wind tax credits than the House-passed bill secured, which moderate GOP senators argued went too far.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Thursday that the Senate’s more lenient approach to green energy tax breaks is “going to need to get reversed.
“Liberalizing is not the direction to go,” Scalise said.
Both Norman and Cloud suggested that the president’s bill is the best opportunity to change Congress’ fiscal trajectory and they are not going to let it slip away without a fight.
“It’s hard to imagine another opportunity we have right now with the House and the Senate, with Republican leaders in place and a president who is transformative and willing to do the big, bold things,” Cloud said.
Norman agreed, telling the DCNF that he’s not going to wait for future bills to slash government spending.
“We’ve got one chance at this,” Norman said. “The only leverage we have to get these people up here to get conservative is the tax bill.”
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