House Republicans and the Big Bad Bill
Not content to let Donald Trump and the executive branch have all the fun, last week House Republicans passed a budget reconciliation bill that is cruel, inefficient, and extremely expensive. In fact this bill represents one of the most significant transfers of wealth from working people to the wealthy in American history.
Which, as Jamelle Bouie pointed out in his Sunday NYT newsletter (worth the cost of a digital subscription alone), is not all that surprising. In fact, this kind of legislation has been a staple of Republican policy making since Reagan was in office. As Bouie writes: “With each new Republican administration, it is the same promise. With each round of tax cuts, it is the same result: vast benefits for the wealthiest Americans and a pittance for everyone else. There is little growth but widening inequality and an even starker gap between the haves and have-nots.”
Every Republican administration, no matter what they say on the campaign, comes into office promising that if they just cut taxes for the rich, if they just unleash big business from the oppression of safety regulations, if they just let the free market reign, somehow all the wealth this creates will find its way down to the rest of us. And every single time, when Democrats return to power, they are faced with a financial crisis, the ever more gaping maw of wealth inequality, and voters who feel angry and powerless and ignored. Democrats then, because of both Republican intransigence and cowardly or corrupt factions within our own party, face the electoral consequences of being unable to solve a problem that has been entrenched for decades in a mere four years. But that’s a different post.
This post is a call to action. The machinations of Congressional procedure, the finer points of budget reconciliation, and the multitude of tax code manipulations of this budget bill (or as the Republicans have named in it in honor of their puppet master, One Big Beautiful Bill, which will, because they are not that smart, become the One Big Beautiful Bill Act if passed) are not that important. What is important is the story that we tell about this bill, and the fact that it is not law yet.
The Senate still has to pass a budget. They can either pass this bill, or their own bill that would then have to get reconciled with the House bill (see what we did there?). Because of weird Congressional rules, this bill is not subject to the filibuster, and therefore can be passed with a simple 50% majority and only Republican votes. Republicans can afford to lose three Senators, which means that “would-be moderates like Susan Collins [and Lisa Murkowski], and performative populists like Josh Hawley,” as Dan Pfeiffer calls them, are targets for pressure. So too is Thom Tillis, a Republican Senator in a state that regularly elects Democrats to statewide office.
It’s not clear at this point how much appetite there is in the Senate to go against either Donald Trump or House Republicans by passing something different or by mitigating the harm of the current bill, but whatever appetite there is, is ours to exacerbate, and to do that we’re going to have to make a lot of noise.
There’s a lot you can say about this bill. Because Congress has essentially come to a stalemate in the past few years, as most Republicans and even some Democrats would rather campaign off of gridlock than solve it, when Democrats or Republicans have both the White House and Congress they essentially have one chance to pass legislation by squeezing as much as humanly possible into the budget. If you remember, at its biggest, the Build Back Better bill was supposed to expand union protections, reform immigration, address climate change, provide funding for child care, home care, and housing, invest in higher education, and fund paid family leave, among other things. And while in the end, that’s not exactly what we got in the Inflation Reduction Act, we still got plenty from that list.
The One Big Beautiful Bill (it’s so stupid I have to keep saying it), bloated and overwrought as it is, does not do any of that. If you want a detailed breakdown of every single thing in the bill, the New York Times has you covered. If you want a more analytical breakdown of how the bill transfers wealth from working people to the wealthy, I’d check out this post from G. Elliot Morris in Strength in Numbers. But here’s what stuck out at me:
This bill defunds Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortion care along with other healthcare by denying them Medicaid reimbursements
It prohibits Medicaid from covering gender affirming care for literally anyone covered by Medicaid. Gender affirming care saves lives, by the way.
It rescinds just about every tax credit from the Inflation Reduction Act used to address the climate crisis it can get its hands on.
It cuts student loan assistance programs, including many launched by the Biden administration
Massively increases defense spending, including $100 million for Trump’s mass deportation efforts, which are splitting up families and kidnapping people and sending them to foreign torture prisions.
Oh, and it massively cuts Medicaid and SNAP which imperils the health care, school lunch programs, and food assistance programs that support millions of children. That’s right, read that again: millions of children. Millions of adults would also lose their health care because of this legislation, which has the potential to destroy already jeopardized rural hospitals and create significant unemployment in the health care industry, leading to what is often known as the Medicaid death spiral.
Kids going hungry. Their parents can’t take them to the doctor, or get health care for themselves. Storms and other natural disasters keep getting worse (while Trump rejects FEMA applications even from Republican governors). Abortion care gets more and more inaccessible, while having a kid gets more and more expensive (the $1000 Trump accounts for babies in this bill are genuinely laughable). And all the while, this regime punishes those who speak out against them, ripping away from us our rights, our dignity, our neighbors and friends.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is predicated on a massive lie that Republicans have been trying to sell us for generations, the lie that government programs like Medicaid and SNAP are rife with waste, fraud and abuse. That the only way to address this is to cut these programs, to weigh them down with onerous red tape and bureaucratic nonsense that they call work requirements but are actually just meant to create enough friction that millions of people will be forced off the program for not filling out the right forms. The lie betrays their true goal. It will not save money, it will not prevent fraud, and it will not make government more efficient. It will only hurt people, for profit.
As Paul Krugman writes in his newsletter, aptly titled Attack of the Sadistic Zombies, “The belief that many Americans receiving government support are malingering, that they could and should be working but are choosing to be lazy, is a classic zombie idea. That is, like the claim that cutting taxes on the rich will unleash an economic miracle, it’s a doctrine that should be long dead. It has, after all, been proved wrong by experience again and again.”
If you want to read more about how work requirements a) aren’t necessary and b) don’t work, I highly suggest that you check out this short, informative piece from the Center for American Progress. But I think the more important point is that what the One Big Beautiful Bill tries to sell us is the idea that we can stop caring for each other.
Programs like Medicaid and SNAP, like public education and environmental protections and disaster relief and all of the other social supports that this regime wants to destroy, are predicated on the belief that there are some things we do better together; that as a nation we are more than the sum of our parts. The idea is that with our taxes, we pay into these programs that support and uplift the most vulnerable members of our society, making us stronger and healthier as a whole. But even more than that, we also get the comfort of knowing that these programs will be there for us if and when we need them. I was on Medicaid when I was in grad school - it helped me get care when I needed it, to save my money for things like groceries and rent, and gave the people who love me peace of mind. None of us know the future - we don’t know what accident, illness, disaster, or age will do to our bodies and our homes and our communities. But we know that the programs we support with our tax dollars take care of those who need them now, and will be there for us in the future.
No matter how hard we try, we cannot cut ourselves off from each other. Not just because it would be a moral disaster, but because it is literally impossible. We share roads and libraries and fire departments. We share hospitals and doctors. We share air and water and land. We are tied to each other. The people who rely on Medicaid and SNAP and other programs getting eviscerated by this bill are not other people. They are us.
We are, as they say in High School Musical, all in this together. As it says on the dollar, e pluribus unum: out of many, one.
This Trump regime and Republicans in Congress want to tear us apart. They want to isolate us, scare us, and deprive us of a future where we can all thrive. But we are better together. We are more than the sum of our parts. And we’re not going to let them pull us apart. We’re going to do our damnedest to stop this bill before the Senate votes on it. And if we can’t, we’re going to tell the story of what happened here. We’re going to make them hear us, and we’re going to get our country back.
Learn more about how to call your Senators, attend an event, and make a lot of noise from this great guide Vote Save America put together, and then let’s go to work.