Senate Passes Big Beautiful Bill

JUST IN – U.S. Senate passes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. pic.twitter.com/CWBYD0QKfJ

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 1, 2025

3 adjectives for how Americans feel about the Big Beautiful Bill: awful, horrible, & to quote Sir Charles Barkley “terrible, terrible, terrible”.

Net favorables of the bill range from -19 pt to -29 pt in June polls.

49% say the bill will hurt their family. 23% say it’ll help. pic.twitter.com/W97mcc4ZXJ

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) June 30, 2025

I am massively oversimplifying here, so free to yell at me, but doing my best w/ imperfect information here is roughly how I’d try to break down the massive Senate tax bill to a friend:

1. Extending/increasing prior GOP tax cuts w/ broad reach (larger standard deduction; raises…

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) July 1, 2025

Tillis: What do I tell 663,000 people in two years, three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?

The people in the White House advising the president, they’re not telling him that the effect… pic.twitter.com/MhJAdPg4OA

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2025

REPORTER: Do you have concerns about the Medicaid cuts though?

TRUMP: No. We’re not gonna be playing with Medicaid

REPORTER: 11.8 million Americans could lose their coverage. Are you breaking your promise?

TRUMP: Waste, fraud, and abuse pic.twitter.com/1fFEiUgbXk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2025

?BREAKING: Marjorie Taylor Greene just announced on the Steve Bannon show that Trump’s Big Bullshit Bill doesn’t have enough votes in the House.

“This is far from over… I can’t imagine [it passing].. Johnson does NOT have the votes.”

She even called it “a shitshow.” pic.twitter.com/V9RknCo4eP

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) July 1, 2025

Scalise: “The 35-year-old who’s sitting in his mom’s basement playing video games is gonna have to go get a job again.” pic.twitter.com/Bin5giWID0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2025

Markwayne Mullin: “There are 35 million people that live below the poverty line inside the US. There are over 70 million people signed up for Medicaid. Now you’re gonna tell me there’s not room to make cuts?” pic.twitter.com/bCq7ZSkGxL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2025

Jim Banks on Medicaid cuts: “Let’s make sure that people who are able-bodied go to work every day and don’t get things for free.” pic.twitter.com/u79jJWxfrK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2025

TAPPER: “Are you guaranteeing that these changes that you are voting for Monday presumably will not hurt recipients in Alabama of Medicaid, of food stamps or SNAP, for those who are citizens and for those who truly need it and deserve it?”

BRITT: “Absolutely.” pic.twitter.com/BJ0Plkmcic

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) June 29, 2025

It should be called the Big Beautiful Political Disaster.

Yes, I know we should be celebrating the Republican Senate passing this bill as a win which will fund all kinds of immigration priorities, but it comes at the steep cost of being politically toxic due to making business tax cuts permanent and cutting popular entitlement programs like Medicaid. It is like a birthday cake that tastes delicious on some level, but which is ultimately poisonous.

Politico:

“It was the exact opposite of what nearly everyone on Capitol Hill expected.

Rather than soften its edges, Senate Republicans took the sprawling Republican megabill the House sent them and sharpened it further, making the heart of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda more politically explosive. …

This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP’s chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along. …

To compensate, Finance Committee Republicans significantly dialed back some of Trump’s marquee campaign promises to enact tax relief for tipped wages and overtime work. Many of those senators privately scoffed that the populist tax policies were not particularly pro-growth, as opposed to the write-offs for business equipment and research and development expenses. …”

As usual, the immigration provisions for Trump voters are a small part of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which is otherwise a glorified Omnibus of unpopular tax cuts and entitlement cuts.

CBS News:

“Washington — Republicans plan to slash Medicaid funding to help offset the tax cuts and new spending included in President Trump’s massive domestic policy bill. There are some differences between the approaches taken by Senate and House Republicans, making Medicaid among the most divisive issues lawmakers have had to navigate in recent months. …

About 71 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid, according to the government’s most recent data. According to a Congressional Budget Office report published late Saturday, the changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in the Senate version would result in an increase of nearly 12 million more uninsured people by 2034. 

The House-passed version would leave slightly fewer without health insurance — nearly 11 million — by 2034, mostly due to cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the CBO estimated earlier in June.  

The Senate version makes $930 billion in cuts over a decade to Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, according to the CBO. The House-passed bill includes nearly $800 billion in cuts …”

I think it will end up passing in some form.

I don’t know if the Republican House has the votes to swallow the Senate bill.

I predict the Big Beautiful Disaster will play out like the 2018 midterms when budget reconciliation was used to pass the Trump tax cuts in 2017. From that point forward, the Democrats ran on “tax cuts for the rich” and defined the midterms as being as a referendum on healthcare and won. Democrats are already succeeding in branding the Big Beautiful Disaster as a Medicaid bill, not an immigration bill.

Note: I wish I could say that I am surprised, but Senate Republicans never learn anything. These are the same people who were all over television last week panicking elderly people watching FOX News about Iran being “two weeks away” from nuking New York City.