By DEBRA J. SAUNDERS

Las Vegas Review-Journal

WASHINGTON (TNS) — I’ve often railed at Democrats’ failure to revamp federal immigration law during the two years President Joe Biden enjoyed a Democratic Senate and House. When they had the chance, they squandered it. Now it’s the Republicans’ turn at bad one-party rule.

President Donald Trump and the GOP Senate and House have a chance to check runaway deficit spending — not by ending it, alas, but by doing what is possible to rein it in. But will they?

Not likely. The White House boasts that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “delivers the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years, with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.”

And yet after House leaders released changes for the reconciliation measure, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted Tuesday that, “Overall, the bill would add more than $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade with interest — including $600 billion in 2027 alone — and add more than $5.2 trillion to the debt through 2034 if made permanent.”

It turns out the party of limited government is no longer the party of limited government. It’s the party of tax cuts that aren’t paid for.

If you had any doubt, consider what Trump told House Republicans Tuesday: “Don’t f- with Medicaid.”

And because Trump says it, Republicans go along. Which means America’s national debt, now approaching $37 trillion — or $107,000 per American — will pile up.

“The deficit as a share of GDP is currently 6 percent, an extremely high level for a country with low unemployment and not at war,” the Peter G. Peterson Foundation warned. “The level of debt will soon exceed 100 percent of GDP, a level we have not reached since World War II.”

Trump also is not cutting Medicare or Social Security — the entitlement programs that are the biggest drivers of the national debt.

This could be the Republicans’ last chance to reform spending — maybe, say, by raising the age for receiving full Social Security benefits — and it is slipping away.

That last time the federal budget was balanced was during President Bill Clinton’s years in the Oval Office. Credit goes to a fiscally conservative Republican Congress that pressed a Democratic president to rein in federal spending.

Praise for Bill Clinton. I can’t believe I just wrote that.

( Contact Review- Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@ reviewjournal. com.)