Donald Trump, formally and peacefully certified yesterday as the next president, wants to launch his second term by ramming through a “big, beautiful bill” that will encompass everything from immigration to energy to taxes. Glopping all that into a single package is a terrible idea and the Congress should not go along.
Perhaps the president-elect forgot during his time away, but the government actually has different branches, and Congress is not just a vehicle for his policy agenda. It is meant to be a deliberative body where different committees with different expertise figure out the best paths forward, in consultation with and not at the direction of the president.
Beyond the mechanics of such a MAGA mega-bill, Trump should give some thought to what his ideas actually portend for the country. We can’t say the man has ever really shown himself to be a deep policy maven when it comes to actual governing, beyond his gift for marketing and personalistic campaigning, but these are proposals with major implications for the tens of millions of people who voted for him.
Tariffs, particularly in one of the indiscriminate and extremely expansive forms that Trump floated throughout the campaign, would do serious damage to international trade and U.S. consumer prices, which would immediately shoot up in every sector including basic purchases like food, fuel and electronics.
Even more limited versions like those currently under consideration would bring heavy risks, and any mitigation would be largely undone by across-the-board tariffs on our neighbors and biggest trading partners of Mexico and Canada. It seems that Trump wants to balance the resulting spike in consumer prices with big tax cuts, but that would be a significant departure from our present tax structure and is too much to cram into a single bill.
As much as immigration and its exploitable sense of disorder has been electorally animating for the GOP base, the truth is that most people don’t actually realize what a mass deportation campaign would actually entail, starting with their own rights and civil liberties. There’s no way to engage in massive surveillance, arrest and detention operations targeting millions of people around the country without to some extent damaging everyone’s rights.
As we’ve pointed out before, such an operation also cannot, from a pure mathematical standpoint, target only “bad guys” or criminals or whatever some people are imagining to be the objective here. It will come after your neighbors, people you work with, people who volunteer in your local community and bring their kids over to your barbecues. Not only will this tear at the social fabric of communities around the country, it will bring the hammer down on the economy in practically all sectors, including existential ones like food production, construction and health care.
On energy, the mantra of “drill baby drill” is catchy enough, but it ignores that it is at this point probably more expensive, less secure and worse for the economy to try to turn back the clock on alternative energy production gains. These are a growth industry, and whatever additional economic activity we can eke out from going even heavier into oil and gas has to be balanced against the potential for the detrimental impacts of climate change, which is real and which really can be affected by the decisions of a massive polluter like the United States.
Trump has spent four years waiting. Now it’s time to actually govern and make policy changes work.
