Strange! A few GOP Senators — Thom Tillis (North Carolina), Rand Paul (Kentucky), and Susan Collins (Maine) — voted against the Let’s Kill America Bill, but somehow Trump’s party pulled it out in the end. Funny how that happens, how the people in charge of all branches of government manage to demonstrate seams of dissension and individual thought in exactly the right ratio in order to let Vice President JD Vance cast the deciding, 50-50-tie-breaking vote.
The “swing” vote, such as it is, was Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who hemmed and hawed for days before capitulating in what should be embarrassing fashion. “Do I like this bill?” she said to NBC News, apparently “quietly seething” at the reporter’s questions. “No.” Ah. Well then.
“I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests,” she went on. “But I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.”
Among those who “are not going to be advantaged” — “harmed” seems shorter, “hurt” maybe, “devastated” perhaps, “outright murdered” if you want to drill down a bit — are the 12 million or so who will be kicked off their health insurance, the millions more who will lose or see reduced SNAP benefits, the all-of-us facing down an ICE suddenly flush with utter impunity and more money than the Marines, the planet cooked by eliminated renewable energy credits and subsidies. All that, apparently, is fine.
Murkowski, who somehow is granted the term “moderate” by such objective balls-and-strikes callers as the New York Times, came around on all of that thanks to some frankly preposterous Alaska-specific gifts the GOP leadership crammed into the almost thousand-page bill. In one case, a provision requiring that states pay the cost of SNAP benefits if their error rates are high concerned the state’s senior Senator — Alaska has among the highest such rates. And so Republicans first tried to exempt “non-contiguous states” from the rule, which was laughed out of the room by the Senate parliamentarian; instead, they have offered a two-year exemption for states with the highest rates of over- or under-payment of SNAP benefits. If this sounds like a direct call for the rest of the states to start screwing up their payments, well, it is.
The bill is now back in the hands of the House, where various holdouts are making the same sort of grumbly mouthsounds Murkowski made. There are Members concerned about the Medicaid cuts, but also some outright kooks who think the cuts to renewable energy benefits are not draconian enough to pass the bill. Votes are expected relatively quickly in the lower chamber. The razor-thin margin Republicans hold there suggest it could be a real fight; the rest of modern GOP history suggests it will look like one, at least for a bit.
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