No one wanted Trump’s devastating budget bill. Of course it passed | Moira Donegan
TOn Thursday, the budgetary reconciliation bill which adopted the House of Representatives of the United States and was quickly signed by Donald Trump represents the particular perversity of national politics in America: apparently, no one wants, everyone hates it, and it is largely agreed to be devastating for an amazing number of Americans. And yet, the bill felt inevitable: it was a lost conclusion that this massive and malignant measure was something that everyone feared and that no one had the capacity to stop.
They didn’t even really try. In the Senate, some conservative republicans have made noise on the dramatic costs of the bill: the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will add $ 3.3 TN to the deficit during the next decade, and Senator Rand Paul, a budgetary falcon of Kentucky, refused to vote for this reason. But other Republicans, who hurt themselves as a taxman taxman responsible against excessive public spending, have embarked on a little independent creative accounting in order to produce an estimate that wrongly affirmed that the cost of the bill would be lower. Most of them quickly found themselves on board.
Moderate republicans, or what remains, also quickly leave the ground. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican facing an uncertain re -election offer, has expressed her concerns about the massive cups of the Medicaid bill, the federal low -income health care program on which many Americans – and many of its voters – count. When Donald Trump threatened to get a main challenge to Tillis in retaliation, the senator announced that he would not ask for re -election after all; He voted against the bill, but also ended his political career. Susan Collins, Maine – she of the lasting “concern” about the sadistic republican agendas that she continues to support – has made a rare gap in her usual formula and voted against the bill, a decision that has come closer to her survey showing her line of approval among her constituents. This only left Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska, who agreed to play the ball: she would vote for the bill, which she had publicly disparaged, in exchange for money for her condition. The result was that Alaska will be exempt, at least temporarily, from the new rules associated with the additional nutrition aid program, or Snap, which helps the Americans with low income to buy enough food to keep themselves alive. The Republicans launched a tax deduction for the captains of the whale of the whale – of all things – and with that, his vote was obtained.
When the bill was sent to the House, a handful of Republicans threatened to hold their votes on the budget and the concerns of Medicaid. But no one believed them. They were always going to engrave, abandon their declared principles and follow Trump’s orders, and they did. Trump, after all, said he wanted the bill to be adopted in time for July 4; He spent the third. He says Jump, and the congress asks: at what height?
They do it even when Trump’s requirements are morally grotesque. The bill will devastate the Americans. His massive cups in Medicaid, combined at the expiration of Obamacare’s subsidies, will lead to around 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next 10 years, effectively canceling the expansion of health care coverage that has been obtained with the health law of Barack Obama. The cuts to break are so deep that they cannot be offset with additional state expenditure; Some people who eat today because they have food aid will be hungry in the future. There are profound reductions in loans and federal subsidies for students, and a quasi-reversal of the investments of the Biden-Ere Inflation Reduction Act in green energy, tax alternatives now going to sectors damaging the climate such as coal and oil instead. Because the bill creates a dramatic budget deficit, the law requires that Medicare, the health care program for the elderly, is also faced with cuts.
All this means nothing of the downstream effects of the legislation. Raid cups in Medicaid, in particular, will devastate the already fragile and partial health system of the United States. Planned Parenthood is now excluded from the federal dollars of Medicaid, which means that around 200 of its 600 clinics will probably have to close, make abortion less accessible even in states where it is legal, and put contraception and screening for STDs and out -of -reach cancer for an unworthy number of American women. Many rural hospitals will also have to close nursing homes. These remaining health clinics will have longer and more outpatient waiting times and will offer more expensive care. In the end, fewer people go to the doctor, and more of them will unnecessarily die from treatable and avoidable conditions.
But the bill has winners. It was called, among other things, the highest tax reduction in the country’s history, although the advantage is disproportionate with the billionaires. The ice budget, the Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, is also exponentially widened: from $ 3.5 billion to $ 48.5 billion, making it the largest agency for the application of the country’s law, but always more responsible.
In other words, the bill flies to the sick, the elderly, the hungry and the curious, and gives this looted loot to billionaires and boots. It will deform American life – already sickly and impoverished according to the standards of our homologous countries – cruelly and indeed. This will make us more sick, poorer, more frightening, more ignorant and more threatened. This will make the rich, meanwhile, even richer.
Why do the Republicans vote for a bill that will harm their own voters? Does a bill that undermine their declared values and threaten their career and do the people who are close to their hearts-if only?
One of the most confusing aspects of the Trump era is its ability to leave what the authors of the Constitution – and, in fact the most reasonable, would have supposed to be a decisive characteristic of the competition between the branches: personal interest. Republicans will follow it anywhere, even unpopular votes, even self-sabotage, and frequently to the decrease in the relevance of their own branch. Some say that now he leads them to a mid-term defeat. Democrats have shown their opposition to the bill – in the minority, the programs concern everything they can accomplish – with the minority leader Hakeem Jeffries delivering a speech of eight and a half hours, of filibuster style on the ground, telling the stories of the Americans who will be injured by the legislation, exposing the cream and the crèche of the bill. But you can also detect a suspicion of pleasure in his voice by reading the testimonies of the Americans who live in what the Democrats consider as particularly vulnerable districts for the Republicans in 2026.
The bill is now unpopular, and it is likely to become much more than the extent of its social services discounts, and its impacts on Americans seeking to obtain health care, to buy food, to obtain a habitable future for the environment or to go to school, to become clear. Many politicians who finally voted for this suddenly criticized him for a few days or hours before. They will be attacked on this subject at mid-term: the suffering that the bill will cause will be reduced in television advertisements and on social networks and has constantly played on networks in what Democrats believe they are woned districts. But it is not clear, in the end, if the Americans hurt, including their own voters, will really come back to bite the republican party. It’s not long.
