Okay that’s not its real name; instead, Republicans in the House of Representatives have once again given their embarrassing subservience to the president corporeal form by calling the legislation the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Seriously, it’s right there in the text.
Leaving aside the absurdity of having “Bill” immediately followed by “Act,” the spending bill made its way out of the budget committee in the middle of the night on Sunday into Monday in spite of some deeply grim GOP objections. Four hard-right members changed their votes from no to present, allowing for a 17-16 tally to advance the bill against the votes of all Democrats on the committee and a victory for Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Those hardliners’ objections to a bill that would extend tax cuts for the rich and corporate America, remove a tax on gun silencers and strip funding for Planned Parenthood, tax university endowments and provide tens of billions in immigration enforcement funding? It didn’t go far enough.
“This bill falls profoundly short,” said Chip Roy of Texas on Friday, before he and four others blocked the bill’s progress temporarily. They wanted much steeper cuts to Medicaid, clean energy subsidies, and more, in order to offset the trillions in tax breaks. As it stands, that offset would not be forthcoming: analyses suggest the bill would raise the deficit by as much as $3 trillion through 2034.
But after a weekend of backroom negotiation and the committee reconvening late Sunday evening, Johnson and his cadre swayed the holdouts into their “present” vote through promises to gut healthcare even worse than originally planned, allowing the Bill Act to proceed. It still faces some challenges, given Republicans’ razor-thin margin in the full House; but for now they seem relatively united on pushing forward a bill that would cut nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid and push 13 million Americans off of health insurance.
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