[[link removed]]

THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THIS  
[[link removed]]


 

Jonathan Chait
July 1, 2025
The Atlantic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ By passing Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
congressional Republicans have talked themselves into an
incomprehensibly reckless plan. _

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) speaks with reporters
during a series of votes on a budget reconciliation bill for President
Donald Trump's legislative agenda at the U.S. Capitol, on July 1.,
Francis Chung/POLITICO

 

In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill
[[link removed]] so
massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to
mind a scene [[link removed]] in _The
Sopranos_. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a
Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being
brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly
reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor
of proceeding: “Let’s do it before the crank wears off.” After
that, things go as you might expect.

Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked
themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe
it is to question its authors’ sanity. As of today’s 50–50
Senate vote, with Vice President J. D. Vance
[[link removed]] breaking the tie,
the House and Senate have passed their own versions of the bill. The
final details still have to be negotiated, but the foundational
elements are clear enough. Congress is about to impose immense harm on
tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance,
reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order
to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The
bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.

Given that President Donald Trump
[[link removed]] and the GOP,
unlike the morons in _The_ _Sopranos_, are not collectively under
the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises: _Why
are they doing this?_

Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts
via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically
rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a
much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who
benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional
Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing
rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the
distant future.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3
trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is
so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could
not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they
plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will
expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.

Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater,
reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut
paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public’s
moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in
the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.

Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy
talk. During a pep rally
[[link removed]] to
psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off,
Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn’t
mind. “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not
going to feel any of it,” he explained.

Trump was nodding at the claim that cuts to health-care subsidies and
food assistance would be limited to fraudulent beneficiaries and other
waste. Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no
conceivable world in which it _could_ be true. Even if $1.7 trillion
worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or
fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who
give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.

In reality, the megabill will take food assistance away from some 3
million
[[link removed]] Americans,
while causing 12 million to lose their health insurance. That is how
you save money: by taking benefits away from people. Congress is not
finding magical efficiencies. To the contrary, the bill
introduces _inefficiencies_ by design. The main way it will throw
people off their health insurance is by requiring Medicaid recipients
to show proof of employment. States that have tried this have found
the paperwork so onerous that most people who lose their insurance are
actually Medicaid-eligible but unable to navigate the endless
bureaucratic hassle. The end result will be to punish not only the
millions of Americans who lose Medicaid but also the millions more who
will pay an infuriating time tax by undergoing periodic miniature IRS
audits merely to maintain access to basic medical care.

Another source of cost savings in the megabill involves killing tax
credits and subsidies for renewable energy. Because renewables supply
some 90 percent of new energy capacity in the United States, and
because electricity demand is rising dramatically, these components of
the bill will raise household costs, with the highest spikes hitting
[[link removed]] Texas,
Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and South Carolina, which have
huge wind and solar resources.

Perhaps the most severe political risk of the megabill is the
potential for setting off a debt crisis
[[link removed]].
Rising deficits can cause interest rates to rise, which forces the
government to borrow more money to pay the interest on its debt, which
in turn puts even more upward pressure on rates, in a potentially
disastrous spiral. This prospect is far from certain, but should it
come to pass, it would dwarf the other harms of the bill.

You’d think sheer venal self-interest, if nothing else, would cause
members of the Republican majority to hesitate before wreaking havoc
on multiple economic sectors. Yet none of these outcomes has given
them pause.

One explanation is that they don’t understand just how unpopular the
bill is apt to be when it takes effect. Many Republicans rely on
party-aligned media for their news, and these sources have mostly
cheered the bill while ignoring its downsides. Both chambers of
Congress have rushed the bill through with minimal scrutiny, shielding
members from exposure to concerns. Even the White House seems unaware
of what exactly it’s pressuring Congress to do. Yesterday, when a
reporter asked
[[link removed]] Press Secretary
Karoline Leavitt about the megabill’s proposed tax on wind and solar
energy, she appeared totally unfamiliar with the measure and punted
the question. (The tax provision
[[link removed]] was
later removed.)

When the Affordable Care Act passed, 15 years ago, Republicans
protested that the law had been rushed through Congress. That was not
true: The ACA was painstakingly shaped over the course of a year. But
the attack seems to have revealed a belief among Republicans that
speed and secrecy are political advantages that a shrewd party would
employ. They have utilized this method to stampede members of Congress
into enacting sweeping social change with minimal contemplation.

The second explanation is that Republicans in Congress, or at least
some of them, _do_ understand the consequences of their actions, and
are willing to accept the political risk because they truly believe in
what they’re doing. Republicans have, after all, spent decades
fighting to reduce the progressivity of the tax code and to block the
expansion of guaranteed health care for people unable to purchase it
on their own.

The third explanation is that the political logic of doing the
president’s bidding has created an unstoppable momentum. Trump has
been flexible on the specifics of the legislation. (He floated
slightly raising the top tax rate on the rich, to disarm a Democratic
attack on it, only for Republicans in Congress to shoot him down.) His
sine qua non for the bill is that it be big and beautiful. Using
Trumpian lingo to label the bill was a clever decision to brand it as
a Trump bill rather than to identify the measure by its much less
popular contents.

Trump has accordingly treated internal dissent ruthlessly. When Elon
Musk denounced the bill for blowing up the debt and cutting energy
technology, Trump threatened to cut Musk’s federal subsidies
(subsidies that, curiously enough, he had no previous objection to
maintaining). When Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina criticized
the bill’s Medicaid cuts, Trump threatened to back a primary
challenger in next year’s midterms. Tillis immediately announced
that he will not seek reelection.

Republicans in Congress have grumbled, occasionally trying to exert
leverage to force policy changes. But, with rare exceptions, they have
never entertained the prospect of actually opposing Trump’s big,
beautiful bill. Their criticism begins from the premise that its
passage is necessary. They keep repeating the phrase “Failure is not
an option,” a mantra that seems designed to prevent them from
considering the possibility that passing the bill could be worse than
the alternative. Senator Josh Hawley wrote a _New York Times_ op-ed
[[link removed]] opposing
Medicaid cuts, then fell in line. “This has been an unhappy episode
here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid,” he told NBC News
[[link removed]],
referring to an effort that he then personally participated in by
voting in favor of the bill.

Or perhaps Republicans in Washington have simply grown inured to
Trump-era warnings of catastrophe, which have blared for a decade on
end, with accelerating frequency during the second Trump term. Trump
has gone to war with the global economy, unilaterally slashed huge
swaths of the government, threatened to imprison his enemies, and so
on, and yet these affronts never quite bring the widespread
devastation—and public revolt—that Trump’s critics warn of. One
gets the sense that elected Republicans have stopped listening.

They have picked a bad time to let their guard down, however, because
this bill is different. One way is that legislation, unlike executive
action, is not subject to the TACO
[[link removed]] principle;
once a law has been passed, Trump can’t just quietly back down. The
other is that they will all have cast a vote for it. An angry public
won’t merely blame Trump. The ignominy for the disaster will fall
upon its authors.

_Jonathan Chait
[[link removed]] is a staff
writer at The Atlantic._

* Big Beautiful Bill
[[link removed]]
* Trump
[[link removed]]
* Billionaires
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]