Is Trump's Big Ugly Bill Going To Turn Out To Be The GOP’s Suicide Pact With The Billionaire Class?

It’s The Biggest Heist in U.S. History—And Carried Out In Plain Sight

Everyone is wondering how long it will take Señor TACO to force Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian, something Thune already announced he isn’t inclined to do. Presumably his inclination will change when Trump starts threatening him. And he will. Elizabeth MacDonough— who has been serving since 2012— is no Elizabeth Warren, but she is certainly making it impossible for the Senate to pass Trump’s big ugly bill. Over the weekend, she saved SNAP, the food stamps program, athough she “allowed Republicans to include a 10-year moratorium on enforcing state and local artificial intelligence laws— a surprising result for the provision that’s split the GOP.” Ted Cruz’s version “made upholding the moratorium a condition for receiving billions in federal broadband expansion funds” and it passed  muster. It’s worth noting that “Though the parliamentarian delivered a victory for Republicans, a number of conservative senators including Sens. Josh Hawley (MO) and Marsha Blackburn (TN), have vocally opposed the provision. Hawley has vowed to work with Democrats on an amendment to remove the language once the megabill hits the floor.” Marjorie Traitor Greene and members of the House Freedom Caucus “have also opposed the AI moratorium, with Greene threatening to oppose the megabill if the legal freeze remains.”

But, aside from the AI moratorium, she’s been ruling in favor of the Democrats on most of the big issues— including what Jennifer Bendery termed a provision that would make it nearly impossible for anyone to sue the Trump administration for breaking laws. MacDonough said it violates the reconciliation rules. “In short,,” wrote Bendery, “this provision would allow Trump to serve as a king, free to ignore the courts amid his lawlessness. The Senate parliamentarian… determined Saturday that this provision is not related to budget matters.” UPDATE: Last night Mike Lee’s efforts to sneak some anti-regulations regulation into the Big Ugly Bill got knocked out by MacDounough.

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein wrote that the “bill illuminates the central fault line in the modern GOP electoral coalition more starkly than any legislation in decades. The bill sharpens the GOP’s long-standing tension between a political strategy that increasingly relies on financially squeezed working-class voters and an economic agenda that still funnels its greatest direct benefits to the affluent. The budget legislation makes that conflict unusually explicit because, for the first time in 30 years, the GOP has tied large spending cuts that will mostly hurt families below the median income in the same bill with big tax cuts that mostly benefit families above it. In the past, Republican tax bills ‘where the benefits were more tilted toward the rich were not uncommon,’ said Harris Eppsteiner, associate director for economic analysis for the Budget Lab at Yale University. ‘But the thing that is unique here is that it is paired to cuts in the safety net that will leave folks at the bottom worse off.’”

More than any other single factor, Democrats are counting on a voter backlash against the budget bill… to power them to gains in the 2026 midterm elections.

“It’s a powerful thing to be able to say they are cutting Medicaid and people’s health care, popular programs, to fund a tax cut for the wealthiest people,” said Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster.

Congressional Republicans are already trying to build defenses against that argument. They are highlighting the aspects of the tax plan with the broadest populist appeal and presenting the bill’s substantial cuts in Medicaid spending as a form of welfare reform that will preserve benefits for the neediest. Since the Ronald Reagan era, Republicans also have consistently shown that they can neutralize Democratic economic appeals to White blue-collar voters by painting the party as excessively liberal on cultural issues such as crime, immigration and LGBTQ rights.

Yet the magnitude of what Republicans are attempting with this single bill will test that record. Simultaneously, according to nonpartisan analyses, the bill could strip health insurance from at least 16 million Americans and significantly cut food assistance— while also providing tax cuts worth over $100,000 annually to the top 0.1% of earners. Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee aide who now analyzes fiscal policy at the [moderate, corporate] Center for American Progress, says that considering all its provisions, the legislation “would be the biggest transfer from the poor to the rich in a single bill in US history.”

An early skirmish between Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and a liberal advocacy group is previewing how the debate may play out next year over what Republicans, adopting President Trump’s terminology, are calling their “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Unrig the Economy, the liberal advocacy group, has run radio and television ads in Bacon’s Omaha district attacking him over his vote supporting the budget bill when it passed the House in May. “He’s actually cutting Medicaid so he can give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires,” an Omaha woman identified as Audrey declares in the television ad.

The argument that Republicans are taking health care from people who need it to fund tax cuts for people who don’t is likely to be central in Democratic House and Senate campaigns next year. “It is key that both House and Senate Democrats continue to implement this message as far and wide as possible,” the DCCC wrote in a strategy memo released earlier this month.

Bacon, one of just three House Republicans left in districts that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election,  has previewed the likely GOP response to those arguments in his pushback against the advocacy group’s ads. He’s emphasized the portion of the bill’s Medicaid changes adding work requirements. “We expect if you’re an able-bodied adult without children that you should be seeking a job or getting the skills to get another job or as a minimum, volunteering 20 hours a week,” Bacon said in a press call with local reporters earlier this month.

Republicans yoked the tax and spending cuts into one bill largely to satisfy hardline House conservatives who were complaining that the tax plan dangerously inflated the federal deficit and debt.

… When congressional Republicans previously married tax and spending cuts into a single bill did not end well for them. In that 1995 confrontation, Clinton won the battle for public opinion, reviving his foundering presidency and propelling him toward an easy reelection in 1996. Clinton prevailed by stressing the argument Democrats are echoing today: Republicans are cutting programs that benefit average Americans to fund tax cuts for the rich.

As in 1995, the GOP budget plan is facing widespread public skepticism. Substantially more Americans said they opposed than supported the bill in recent national polls by the non-partisan Pew Research Center and KFF thinktank, as well as in Washington Post/Ipsos, Fox News, and Quinnipiac University surveys.

Though the Senate is considering changes to the House-passed legislation, both bills are built around the same two pillars: extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts for all earners and offsetting that cost primarily by cutting federal spending on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

…The GOP’s challenge in selling this package is even more complicated than in 1995 because of changes in their electoral coalition. Compared with that era, Republicans today are much more reliant on working-class voters without a four-year degree—not only the white voters in that category, but also increasingly the blue-collar minorities who provided Trump’s most important gains in the 2024 election.

That means many more GOP voters than in Gingrich’s time rely on federal safety net programs. Looking at people who have purchased health care through the ACA, KFF found that more identify as Republicans than Democrats. Sixty-four House Republicans represent districts where the share of adults on Medicaid exceeds the national average. Republicans hold 13 Senate seats across the 20 states that have insured the most people under the Medicaid expansion funded by the ACA— which is the principal target for both the House and Senate cuts. Medicaid funding is especially critical to hospitals in rural areas, which now vote overwhelmingly Republican.

Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, says that targeting federal health care programs for such large reductions dangerously ignores the changes in the GOP’s electoral base since the days when fiscal hawks such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan set the party’s fiscal agenda.

“The GOP coalition is dramatically different today than it was 10 years ago,” Ayres said. “This looks like a bill that could have come out of a Paul Ryan House of Representatives rather than a Donald Trump House of Representatives.”

The Trumpists are gambling that they can sneak this through while everyone’s distracted by the noise and chaos they themselves generate, bombing Iran just being the most dramatic. But this is a full-frontal assault on the working class to grease the palms of the ultra-rich, not just some typical Republican stealth maneuver. They’re cutting Medicaid, slashing food aid, trying to shield themselves from lawsuits, all in one depraved package. If geriatric Democrats like Schumer can’t hammer this for what it is— government by and for the predators— then maybe they don’t deserve to be in the fight. The stakes are existential. If this bill passes, it will mark one of the biggest upward transfers of wealth and power in modern history— done in plain sight, without shame, Schumer having actually voted to move this looting forward! It’s the MAGA elite using the machinery of government to strip the poor and working class of their last protections so they can bankroll another round of tax cuts for their donors and themselves. They’re daring voters— their own voters— to notice what’s being done to them. And if Democrats can’t meet this moment with a clear, unrelenting message about whose side they’re on, screw them! Sure, the blame for this moral atrocity will always belong to the Republicans who wrote it, cheered it, and sold it with a smile, but isn’t it time for Democratic voters to move beyond the tepid centrists who enable the Republicans and their agenda?

Republicans aren’t only getting pressure from normal people, of course. MAGA extremists and powerful corporate interests have the ability to communicate— and with teeth. In Alaska, where the survival of NPR is perhaps more important than in any other state, Senators Murkowski and Sullivan are being beaten up to help Trump defund it. This is a real ad!