When then President-elect Donald Trump declared to me on January 5 of this year that “My preference is one big, as I say, one big, beautiful bill,” he started a snowball rolling down Congressional Hill that has gathered momentum and should be on his desk, perhaps by July 4, and certainly not later than Labor Day weekend. Trump willed H.R. 1 into being the way he willed his return to the Oval Office: By speaking clearly and repeatedly about what had to be done. Turns out the commander-in-chief is also the “closer-in-chief.”
Of course, the House and Senate GOP knew they could not have allowed Trump’s 2017 triumph of his first tax bill to expire at the end of this year and thus shatter an economy recovering its bearings and its potential for great growth after the disastrous years of inflation unleashed by former President Joe Biden’s reckless looting of the federal treasury.
But neither did it seem likely they could make the Trump tax code permanent as well as add more cuts to taxable income for folks who depend on tips, for seniors and for homeowners in states with burdensome tax rates.
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But the president worked so closely with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer that he not only got the “one, big, beautiful bill” through the House, he got what he promised on the campaign trail last year. Now he seems likely to help Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate GOP Whip Mike Barrasso and Conference Chair Senator Tom Cotton pilot H.R. 1 through the narrows of that body.
But the challenge will come when the Senate “leaves its fingerprints” on the bill, as West Virginia Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito put it to “the fellas” on the “Ruthless” podcast this week. Senators have ideas too. They are equal participants with the House members and the Senate GOP can also only lose three of their 53 votes and still carry the “one, big, beautiful bill” forward.
There are two things which can be done to make the bill better and also create some space for money for rural hospitals which, as Capito stressed, is of great concern to many in the GOP conference.
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The first big change is to add a process by which entitlement reform could commence, and the second is an “IRA/401k conversion window” where a flat tax would be applied to seniors who wish to convert their IRA/401k assets into Roth IRAs, a window which if opened for this tax year, would yield trillions in revenue next year and thus prevent the “one, big beautiful bill” from increasing the debt, while also being wildly popular with the demographic most likely to vote in the 2026 mid-terms.
First, fiscal hawks worried about the rising debt could be lured into supporting the final version of the bill by the promise of a shot at entitlement reform — not cuts — in this Congress. To accomplish this requires the senators remember both the “Greenspan Commission” and the “BRACs.”
The Greenspan Commission, officially the National Commission on Social Security Reform, was a bipartisan commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan and the leaders of the two houses in 1981 to address a short-term financing crisis facing Social Security.
Led by Alan Greenspan, its report produced the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which included both benefit-reduction and revenue-raising measures to address the projected funding shortfall. Social Security was in much worse shape then than now. Now, Social Security, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, need reforms, not benefit cuts.
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The “BRAC” was the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, established by law, which proposed closures or realignments of military facilities across the U.S and the world to improve efficiency and reduce costs. A BRAC Commission has been used five times — with rounds initiated in 1988, 1991, 1993, 1995 and 2005 – and each produced lists of military bases and facilities to be combined or closed.
Its members compiled the lists and the result was presented to Congress with the choice: do nothing and the BRAC recommendations became law or pass a resolution rejecting them all. It was and remains a brilliant idea that can be applied to entitlement reforms produced by a new Greenspan Commission.
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The new commission, like the original, would be made up of presidential and congressional appointees. It would be tasked with proposing entitlement reforms that would — very gradually— make entitlements fiscally stable. (An example: Raise the retirement age a month every year for the next 40 years, which would raise the retirement age to 69 by 2065. That is a “reform” not a cut, one so gradual as to be unnoticed by Social Security recipients who are already working longer without a prompt from the federal government. Similar reforms for Medicare and Medicaid can be put into place that allow for gentle transitions of the sort that responsible reforms embrace.)
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I’ve written about the second big add-on before: the flat tax on IRA/401(k) conversions.
Idaho Republican Senator Mike Crapo, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told me last month this reform is very much on the table. It would raise at least a trillion dollars in one-time revenue and perhaps twice that amount or more. There is opposition from the retirement planning community that operates IRAs and other retirement vehicles, but those offered a 10% or 15% or even a 20% tax on conversion from standard retirement accounts to Roth accounts would applaud long and hard and remember this change come November 2026.
The impact of the amendment to the tax code would fly through the Senate parliamentarian’s review under the “Byrd rule” and more than balance out the fiscal impact of increasing the SALT deduction. Here’s to sanity among the bill’s drafters in the Senate: Sometimes the obvious thing to do is also the right thing to do.
With just these two additions to the bill, both fiscal hawks and the politically minded would find the “one, big, beautiful bill” a magnet that could not be resisted.
All the Senate has to do is polish up H.R. 1 and the Congress can go home for a well-earned summer vacation.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/tv show today.
