Republicans are divided over the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” President Trump wants Congress to pass it, Elon Musk called it a “disgusting abomination,” and Rep. Chip Roy “reluctantly” voted for its current version. Rep. Roy joins Glenn to give his take on the latest updates in the fight. Plus, he gives Glenn his theory on why Elon really slammed the bill.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: So last month, the big, beautiful bill cleared the House by a single vote.

The senators now have been meeting for weeks, behind closed doors.

They return to Washington, late Monday.

They revised the package.

Donald Trump just tweeted out, passing the one, big beautiful bill is a historic opportunity to turn our country around.

They need to work as fast as they can, to get this bill to my desk, before the Fourth of July. Then you have Elon Musk saying the massive outrageous pork-filled congressional spending bill say disgusting abomination.

Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it!

Mike Johnson then says, well, that was advertise appointing.

With all due respect, Elon Musk is my friend. And he's terribly wrong about the one, big beautiful bill.

My for sure, my head hurts from all of this.

Now the White House is sending an additional $9 billion in cuts, which is nice.

But we're hoping for $1 trillion in cuts. And everybody is arguing in $9 billion in cuts.

How is this thing going to even pass?

What is happening here?

We have Chip Roy, who voted for the last one, reluctantly. And I don't know where he stands now. Chip Roy, welcome to the program. How are you, championship.

CHIP: Glenn, how are you doing, brother?

GLENN: I'm good. I'm good. Must not be fun being you right now.

CHIP: Well, you know, here's the thing, when you have a reputation for trying to do the right thing, people do, I think, want to come to you, to figure out, what's the score here? What's the real deal? I'm proud that I think people see me as someone who tries to be honest. And kind of work the lie this. To achieve what you and I and all your listeners want to achieve. We have an obligation to get this done. But we have to get this done right. You said thank you for saying that I voted for it reluctantly.

Because I did reluctantly vote for it. I messaged you at the time. Was reluctant. We have to weight a lot of things right now.

We have a president who was given a mandate, a president that you and I support what he's doing, taking on the establishment, taking on this town.

You know, rooting all this DEI and woke garbage, you know, pushing the barriers. Steering the border. All the things that we know are happening. And we need to do sort of things in this bill. We do need tax relief. We need to extend the tax cuts. We need economic growth by putting more money in the hands of the pockets of Americans.

Those are all important things. But we have to cut spending.

And the swamp creatures in Congress aren't good at that. People like me that are beating our head against the wall, trying to demonstrate. Hey, here's what we need to do, here's how we need to cut.

So now we have to balance this thing. The reason I was reluctant is because it does do some really good things that we bled and fought for, for two months, Glenn. I mean, the week before last, we were at three straight days, going down, negotiating at the White House. Negotiating folks.

And what we got was good. Was it great?

No, it was good.

We got the Inflation Reduction Act reduced down. We got a full repeal basically of all future projects.

But, no. We don't build a 400 billion existing project. We got historic Medicare reductions. Reductions in the increases, yes.

But a trillion dollars' worth, it's never been done, Glenn. Literally, but is that good enough for the moment? Maybe not.

I think we have to do better on that.

All the things about the vulnerable versus the able-bodied.

We got Medicaid work requirements moved out from 29 to 26. We fought like hell to make the bill, something that I think that we could be proud of certain elements.

But Elon is not wrong. Okay?

Elon is not wrong. For the moment, we need to do better.

We need more spending restraint. We need to meet this moment, with the actual deficit reduction that is necessary.

If we get economic growths from the taxes, if we get economic growths from the regulatory policy, if we get economic growths because the president is strong and leading, then we can get out of this mess.

But it's that plus spending restraints. Last point.

I do think it's worth noting, that I'm not sure that Elon is really excited about the extent to which, we are killing the subsidies across-the-board.

GLENN: Wow.

CHIP: All future subsidies for EVs, for solar panels, for the wing craft, all future subsidies we are mostly killing.

There is a few lingering projects. We take it down.

The left is losing their damn mind, Glenn. So there's a little of that that's also at play. So that's a long-winded explanation. A lot to do. We're pushing the Senate. They need to go further. I think we need to fix some stuff.

But I can promise you this, Glenn. If this bill backslides, if they work off what we got, which I don't think is necessarily good enough, I can promise you I will oppose it in the House. So we'll see what the Senate does.

GLENN: Your speculation on what they're going to do? Are they making it worse right now? Is it getting better?

CHIP: I think there are forces at play, that are desperately trying to undo the benefits we got, with respect to repealing the Green New stamp subsidies. Which by the way, the President of the United States campaigned fully and clearly on terminating the green new stamp subsidy.

There are forces, who want to undo that. There are forces in the House, that regret voting for the subsidy he did it.

I think there are forces in the Senate, who are wary of some of our Medicare reforms, which were important. On work requirements, on eligibility. To tighten down and make sure we are trying to make sure the able bodies aren't getting benefits, et cetera.

I don't think it went far enough.

So we will to have work hard, just to hold the line at the House bill, which, Glenn, I would say is on the edge of whether it's good enough to merit moving forward, and hoping we get 3 yards and a cloud of dust.

I will tell you, that if we can repeal IRA subsidies, get the Medicare reforms. Constrain the spending, and the economic growth in the tax policy.

That it's moving the ball down the field.

That's I didn't hold my nose. But if we were truly a conservative Congress, we would cut more. That's just the truth.

GLENN: So I read all kinds of things from the banking sector.

That we're talking about our treasury bills.

That we are -- we are so dangerously close.

You raise the debt ceiling yet again, we are dangerously close to the rest of the world saying, I can't buy their debt anymore.

I mean, they're not serious about anything.

Do you believe we're that close?

CHIP: I believe we're in a very -- yeah. I believe we're on a knife's edge. I think that the bond markets are suggesting that. That's why Scott Bessent has been saying, we need to get deficits down to the percentage of GDP. So we can signal to the bond markets, what needs to be signaled. I think we have an obligation to get this right, right now.

In order to frankly --

GLENN: So why isn't anybody listening to that?

Why isn't anybody listening to Bessent and the bond market?

That's lights out for America, if we don't get that right.

CHIP: Yeah. And let me give you another scary point. If we have to refinance our debt at higher interest rates, which currently we would be projecting, much higher interest rates than the CBO is even projecting. How many times the CBO. We all recognize that they're flawed.

It doesn't matter. You have to look at the model that's in front of you.

The current model projects refinancing that debt at three and a half percent.

What if we have to refinance under the levels of four, four and a half percent? Five percent.

You will have massively more interest expense. Instead of a trillion, it would be a trillion and a half. Instead of a trillion and a half, it would be 2 trillion.

We are going to gobble up our entire government expenditures of interest.

I mean, Glenn, it is that bad. And here's the problem: Is Congress finally waking up to what you and I and the Freedom Caucus and conservatives have been saying now for a decade plus?

Yes. They're realizing that we're in a real bad spot.

All that is doing is coming to the table to do the bare minimum.

Right?

The Medicare reforms. The place for giant subsidies. The food stamp reforms.

The other things we put in this bill.

All of these things which are good. And not as far as I would go.

Just to be clear to your listeners. They're finally getting to the table to accept that. And they're getting there too late.

Now what I'm saying, we need to do more.

The president is sending up recisions.

And, yes. It's just 9 billion.

Why does this matter?

The reconciliation package can pass the Senate with 51 votes.

The normal appropriations process, which we still have to do this year. Will require 60 votes in the Senate.

Right?

So that means it will hard to get through Democrats.

So this recessions process is a way to try to cut some of these ridiculous programs. Like USAID. And other things.

Using a 51 vote threshold.

So that is why we're trying to move it, that way.

The reason it's just a smaller 9 billion-dollar number. Is it's a test case.

Will Congress do its job?

And do this first down payment, a 9 billion-dollar recision of PBS, NPR, and a bunch of USAID foreign government funding, foreign aid wasteful program.

And now we'll see.

I'll, of course, vote for that. You know I will.

But will the moderates?

We'll find out. If they do. We will get another rescission package sent up right after that. So this is all part of the process, working near the president. So I don't need to filibuster. But that's the update.

STU: Speak about the process a little bit, because it's fascinating to watch this bill try to make its way through all of this.

Like for at least my estimates so far, my understanding is that there's at least two Congress men who -- one congresswoman, I suppose, who already have said that their vote was a yes.

But now it would be a no, because they didn't realize what they were voting for.

Which would already put you under the amount that you would need to get it passed. The salt people in the house are saying, if you get he rid of salt, we're done.

The Senate is saying, we're getting rid of salt or at least adjusting it. How does this thing get across the finished line?

CHIP: Well, I mean, like everything else, you have to figure out how to navigate to get to 218 and 251.

We managed to get it this far. Look, you go to war with the army you've got. We have the Congress that we have. We have the president that we have who is trying to get this done. We're trying to work to do it. I think we're in this Zip code. But we're not where we need to be.

So let's take the things, you get some examples. Are there things in this bill, that some of us knew about and were warning about, that others are now just kind of waking up and seeing?

Yes. At the time, I said, for example, there's a car tax in this bill, you fools.

I don't support it. It was a tax to make up for the fact that EVs and hybrids can't, you know, pair their fair share of the gas tax.

They needed $40 billion to pay for some Coast Guard and some other stuff. So how did they pay for it, in the committee? What they did was they added a car tax, for EVs and for hybrids. Now, do you think that we conservatives, with the government views, believe we should have a car tax?

I sure as hell don't.

GLENN: No.

CHIP: How about the AI restrictions?

Should we prohibit Florida, and should we prohibit Texas from having some sort of regulation on AI? From a federal standpoint, I'm not sure we should. So there's a lot of things in this bill, that I knew all this.

Was telling people about it. But there's only 40 fights you can pick.

My fight was, you're going to repeal these damn subsidies on the act, that are killing our grid, undermining our national security, and destroying natural gas and nuclear energy options. My fight was trying to get Medicaid held down.

About 20 other fights. For example, the car tax, Scott Perry and I and a couple of others, at least killed the tax on the internal combustion energy.

They were going to have a car tax in America, y'all. So, look, we're fighting everything we've got coming at us. There are things that need to get fixed.

To answer your question, if they need to adjust salt, I might try to call the bluff of the guys on the salt caucus and say, really?

You're going to vote this down. Because you didn't get more subsidies for your great big tax jurisdiction, right? But if they want to try to call our bluff. I can tell you, if they repeal back the Inflation Reduction Act stuff, which the president campaigned on. Then that's going to be a real problem.

GLENN: I know.

CHIP: So we will see.

It's a fine line. And I'm trying to work with leadership.

The White House, to deliver, as close to my values, as I can.

And be able to look in the mirror, and say, I did enough. And I'm not sure, gentlemen. I'm trying to shoot straight. We're walking a line.

It could easily peel off and I can't support it. It could move in the right direction, and I'll support it.

Say, let's go fight tomorrow for the next thing.

I'm trying to work in good faith with the president and his team to deliver. There's a lot of good things in this bill. Let's remember that. A trillion dollars of real Medicare reform. We've never done that before, guys, ever.

Right? Inflation Reduction Act. Planned Parenthood not funded. Trans surgeries. Repeal for adults and kids, to defund that. The left had gone so far, we're peeling a lot of that back. So let's remember the good stuff, while we're trying to highlight some of our concerns.

GLENN: Chip, I -- you're very reasoned, and I really appreciate talking to you. And I'm really so glad that you are representing the great state of Texas. You're a guy that at least I feel I can trust. You know, you say what you mean. And you mean what you say.

And that is the number one thing I look for in a representative. Is somebody who will say the same thing to me, to my face, as they will behind closed doors. I really appreciate all your hard work on this.

Thanks, Chip.
CHIP: Hey, I appreciate it, Glenn. Thanks for exposing all this to the American people and being truthful about it. This is hard for people like us.

Because you want to be with the team to move the ball down the field. We want to succeed.
We want to win.

But you also don't want to eat a crap sandwich.

So I promise you, I will level the good, the bad, and the ugly. And then you just have to decide what's the best for the country. And vote, and move forward.

That's where we are.

GLENN: Next time, it starts to move forward. You call in and you let us know, what's in it.

You just make sure you get a hold of me.

Soon as you start to see things moving forward, you let us know. Because I appreciate your point of view on that.

Thanks, Chip.