Now the law of the land, signed on the White House South Lawn on Independence Day in a ceremony of triumph, Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will make America less free and give Americans less liberty, a mighty poor 249th birthday present to the United States.
It was quite a political feat to push this through against the opposition of every Democrat in Congress and even against the instincts of many Republicans, but Trump used promises and threats to keep everyone he needed in line to win in each chamber by a single vote. So every Republican senator is the parent of this law, as is every Republican House member, an argument that will be presented to voters next year.
The bill as first passed by the House had been very bad, but it was only made worse in the Senate, which left in all its terrible provisions and made it even more of a deficit buster.
Trying to call the alarm was Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who broke the prior record for the longest speech given on the House floor with an 8 hour, 44-minute address that began just before 5 a.m. More notable than the record, though, was what he said, imploring his Republican colleagues to set aside their fear and fealty to Trump for just a moment and remember their responsibility to their constituents long enough to vote down the behemoth MAGA budget bill.
In the end, Jeffries’ record did nothing but delay the inevitable, which was the passage of the horrible bill.
Budget bills are passed every year and they’re always contentious, so some tuned-out observers might reasonably assume that this is one more in the line of standard-issue budget fights that don’t change things much in the grand scheme. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here; this bill is fundamentally a re-orientation of the federal government and a change to the social compact that did much to generate American prosperity from the aftermath of the Great Depression through today.
It will terminate much of the social safety net for people nationwide, substantially gutting Medicare, Medicaid, food, assistance, housing assistance and all sorts of other expenditures that provide for the least among us.
It does not even save the government any money in doing so; in fact, it is projected to balloon the deficit another roughly $3.4 trillion. How? An unprecedented giveaway to the very, very richest people and corporations while expanding the Trump administration‘s capacity for immigration and speech enforcement, surveillance and detention.
The bill makes ICE the highest-funded law enforcement entity in the history of the United States, and probably in the history of the world, with a budget well beyond the combined budgets of other enforcement entities like the FBI, DEA, ATF and the IRS.
These dollars allow an enormous expansion of every authoritarian activity that the Trump administration has been engaged in over the last several months — the detention of activists and political opponents, teams of agents in full combat gear or in plainclothes with masks and no identification, constant raids and so on.
The bill will severely curtail incentives for green energy development and production, walking away from what is not only a growth industry that could generate hundreds of thousands of jobs and help cement American energy independence, but which help us move away from some of the dangerous emissions that have already helped lead to disastrous impacts as a result of man-made climate change.
Beyond all of that, it is chock full of bizarre ultra-right priorities like getting rid of a sales tax on silencers, something that extraordinarily few people were clamoring for.
All of these reasons or why a lot of polling shows it is the most unpopular piece of legislation in contemporary history, disfavored by 20 or 30 points in all recent polling.
Despite all of this — its enormous unpopularity, the staggering expansion of the police powers in service of an administration that has clearly demonstrated it intends to use those powers to silence criticism and target political opponents and the direct threat to the health and lives of their constituents — GOP legislators voted the bill through, suffering very few defections.
In this way, they have once again demonstrated a total capitulation to Donald Trump, a president whom they seem eager to abdicate their own ostensibly coequal functions. The Declaration of Independence was about freeing ourselves from an unaccountable leader, so why are we going back to that?
