GUY BENSON SHOW: Sen. Majority Leader John Thune Discusses the Big Beautiful Bill, Violence in Los Angeles

Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota joined The Guy Benson Show today to walk through the Senate’s ongoing process of refining the House-passed Big Beautiful Bill, and he highlighted efforts to find deeper spending cuts while still helping President Trump deliver on key campaign promises. Thune also explained how closely he’s coordinating with Speaker Mike Johnson to ensure Republicans don’t lose their razor-thin House majority over changes to the bill. Thune also briefly weighed in on the reported removal of Senator Alex Padilla from a DHS briefing and the violence in CA over ICE raids, and you can listen to the full interview below!

Listen to the full interview below:

Listen to the full podcast below:

Read the full transcript below:

GUY BENSON, HOST, “THE GUY BENSON SHOW”: Earlier today, I had the opportunity to have an exclusive discussion with the Senate majority leader, John Thune, a lot going on, on Capitol Hill, of course.

Here is that one-on-one conversation with Senator Thune.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

BENSON: Mr. Leader, welcome to the show.

SEN. JOHN THUNE (R-SD): Good afternoon, Guy. Always good to be with you.

BENSON: I’d love to ask you about the so-called big, beautiful bill. We have talked to a lot of your colleagues on the House side and also on the Senate side, obviously, some growing pains, some bumps in the road to try to figure out what the Senate can pass out with a simple majority, 50 plus one votes.

The House did their part just barely a few weeks ago. What does this process look like? Because you have got this sort of vice squeeze situation, members on your right flank saying it doesn’t go far enough in some respects,and then other members with different priorities saying, hold on, some of these cuts look too deep.

How do you navigate that and get to 50 plus one, and when?

THUNE: Great question, Guy.

(LAUGHTER)

THUNE: It is a process. And you’re absolutely right. It’s — 51 is the magic number around here. And we have a very wide spectrum of opinions on a whole range of issues, including that can we find more spending reductions, or is it — already, there’s probably too much of that, some would argue.

I think that, for us, obviously, we want to make sure that we’re addressing the needs of the American people and the campaign commitments the president made when he ran and a lot of our folks who ran this last time too. The issues really were the border. So it’s about securing the border, making an intergenerational investment there and making sure the president has the infrastructure in place for long-term security.

Obviously, modernizing our military. It makes historic investments and military defense capabilities to keep Americans safe and deter conflicts around the world. Keep taxes low. If we don’t take action, there will be a $4 trillion tax increase at the end of this year, $2.6 trillion of which would fall on those making under $400,000 a year.

Unleashing American energy dominance, which is producing American energy that will help fight inflation and also provide the power and the juice that our job creators in this country need, and then, of course, return to fiscal sanity. We have got the largest reduction of mandatory government spending in history included in this bill that came over from the House.

And we’re trying to improve upon it, strengthen it, tweak it in ways that we think makes it a stronger bill in the end. But, as you point out, the magic is getting to 51 and 218 and then being able to put a bill on the president’s desk.

So as we work through it, what we’re hearing from everybody. We’re hearing from all spectrums of our conference, and lots of different points of view about how — what we ought to be doing to put the Senate print on it, but, at the end of the day, we’re going to get this done.

BENSON: If you’re able to put the Senate print on it and then it pings back over to the House, and their very delicate coalition of votes — they passed it by one vote last time — even a few of them object to it, that could derail the process.

How frequently are you in touch with Speaker Johnson these questions about, hey, if we do X, will your members do Y? And then also how often are you in touch with the president? Because, of course, he’s kind of the vote whipper in chief in some ways in all of this.

THUNE: Right.

BENSON: What is that dynamic like?

THUNE: Well, I mean, I talk to the speaker all the time and the president all the time for that matter, too, and especially a lot now. I met with the president on Monday. We’re going down later this afternoon.

We’re in regular communication with the White House and hearing from them feedback on again what their priorities are, how they — as the bill takes shape in the Senate, things they’d like to see change or modified or adjusted.

With respect to the speaker, obviously, he has an interest. He was able to get a very narrow majority to vote for it in the House and he wants to be able to preserve that. And so we — as we take the bill here in the Senate, we’re always doing it with an eye toward, yes, we have got senators who want to have the changes made in some aspects of the bill, but at the same time, we have also got to ensure that it aligns with what the speaker can pass, based on what they were already able to get done down there.

So we would like to go above and beyond what they were able to do in terms of spending reductions. There are a few things we’re doing differently in terms of some of the tax pieces. And so it’s not — it won’t be entirely the same bill, but I think the bones of the bill, Guy, will be close enough to what the House passed, at least in my view, that, when we act on it here in the Senate and send it back to the House, they should be able to pick it up and pass it.

I certainly hope that’s the case, because otherwise this thing could drag on endlessly if we start ping-ponging things back and forth. So there’s a real eye toward preserving the House work and adding some Senate equities to it.

BENSON: You mentioned the restoration of fiscal sanity. That’s the way this is being sold by a lot of Republicans. And I support the bill overall for all sorts of reasons. You ran through the big ones, the biggest one being you can’t have this $4 trillion tax increase slam across the board, families, businesses, et cetera, at the end of the year, would be a catastrophe for the economy.

But there are quite a few independent analysts, CBO and others, who’ve looked at this and say, well, there might be some spending reductions over here, but overall the deficit and debt would go up by trillions under this legislation.

What’s your response to that when people question whether this is fiscally sane in your telling?

THUNE: To me, honestly, Guy on that front, Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, as you said, is kind of the official scorekeeper for the Congress. But there are lots of other folks out there who have run models that suggest that the growth generated by the pro-growth aspects of this, tax policy, energy policy, and some of the other things, will generate more growth in the economy, way more than what the CBO projects.

The CBO uses what we call kind of a static scoring model. In other words, they assume everything is going to stay the same, maybe a little bit uptick in growth in the economy. But the kinds of changes that we’re making, we believe, are going to have a dramatic effect on the economy. And a lot of the scorekeeping models out there reflect that.

And so, as you put pro-growth policies in place, you get more growth, coupled with the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending reductions included in here, and you combine those and you end up not increasing the deficit, but reducing it and reducing it fairly significantly. That’s our goal in the Senate. We want this to actually start bending the curve of spending down, bending the deficits in the right direction.

And with pro-growth policies and getting more — generating more revenue from the growth in the economy, you can start seeing this thing come into balance.

BENSON: On that point, one thing that’s at least worth noting, Mr. Leader, is a lot of the people who opposed the tax cuts in 2017 made a whole litany of predictions, doomsaying predictions about what that legislation was going to do.

And they were wrong on virtually every single projection that they made. So, if they’re wrong again, a lot of what you’re saying, I think, will be vindicated.

One more question just on the timing of this, because you said if it keeps going back and forth and dragging out, then the politics get more and more complicated for various reasons. I know that there’s a desire to get this done soon to get the impact on the economy as soon as possible ahead of the midterms.

What does that look like in terms of getting a final vote in the Senate? And could you, I know you have been talking about this, potentially put the July 4 recess in jeopardy in order to get this done? Could that light a fire on the urgency front? Tell us about the timeline.

THUNE: Yes, absolutely.

And, by the way, on the scoring stuff, you’re right. The Congressional Budget Office in the 2017 tax cuts missed the growth estimate by 5.4 percent and the revenue estimates by $1.5 trillion.

BENSON: Oh, is that all?

(LAUGHTER)

THUNE: So their record, yes, isn’t great on that.

On the timing, I think that we — the way I view it is we need to get this done. I want to make sure we get it done right, not necessarily just get it done fast, but I think we can do both. And if we keep available to us that Fourth of July week, obviously, we aren’t going to be here on the Fourth of July, but that week is one that Congress is typically out of session.

And worst-case scenario, if we had to roll into that week to finish this, we will do it. My view is that the more this drags on out there — we need to bring to closure, make the decisions. The decision points are clear, the things that are in front of us, and we need to build on what the House did, hopefully improve it, make it stronger, in some ways hopefully better, and then send it back to them, have them pass it and put it on the president’s desk.

That is the goal, and that’s been my objective from the very beginning, and I think we can achieve it. But a lot has to happen in the next two weeks.

BENSON: I want to turn to this, and our guest is Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota.

One of Senator Schumer’s members, a Democrat from California, Alex Padilla, I’m not sure if you saw the video earlier, but he barged into a press conference that was being given out in Los Angeles by the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem. And he came in, raising his voice, demanding to ask questions of her and just disrupted the event.

He was physically dragged out of the room. That’s a United States senator confronting the DHS secretary over these deportations. When you think about not only the issues at play, the riots in that city in recent days, and just the comportment of a senator, do you have a reaction to what happened out there?

THUNE: Well, what I have seen, Guy, is concerning. And all I have seen — and I just saw this. It was brought to my attention. We were literally on the floor voting here a few minutes back, and I saw the very first video, which evidently is now out there in the public domain.

And so I need to get the questions, get the facts before we make — I will be making a statement, obviously, about that. But, clearly, this is an emotional time. Emotions are running high, especially in the state of California. And so — but we need to make sure that we’re doing things in an appropriate and right way, and that we respect the rights of all citizens, and that includes people who have the title United States senator.

BENSON: When you witness on your screen, and you get briefings on the violence in California, the big, beautiful bill comes to mind. There’s a big border security component of it.

Talk in the final minute that we have together about the significance of that piece of this puzzle in light of recent events.

THUNE: Yes, I mean, I don’t think you can — you can’t get around what’s happening in L.A. today and what’s happened at the border for the last four years. I mean, they are inextricably linked.

And it’s created this environment of lawlessness. And, fundamentally, we — as you know, Guy, we are a nation of laws. And so I think that’s what this conversation has been about. And the president ran on this. He’s worked very hard since he became president to make sure that we have got a secure border, and I think with incredibly positive effects.

So it is — these are — these are all interrelated. And I think a lot of the — some of the elements that you see in the sanctuary cities, sanctuary states today are a result of very lax enforcement of laws in the past, starting with our border.

So the intergenerational investment that’s being made in the border will hire more ICE and CBP agents,it will finish the wall and ensure the president is able to complete his agenda when it comes to cleaning up what I think was the Biden border crisis. It was created by President Biden.

I mean, you had four years of just an open border and 20 million people coming into the country illegally. So these issues are linked. What we need in this country is law and order. We don’t need chaos. And I think — I’m hoping that cooler heads will prevail and that some of these leaders in these states and communities will recognize that their constituents are looking to them to ensure that they have a safe and secure place in which to live and raise their families.

BENSON: Senate Majority Leader John Thune, our guest on “The Guy Benson Show.”

Mr. Leader, as always, thank you for your time.

THUNE: Good to be with you. Thanks, Guy. Talk to you soon.