Trump's massive spending bill is set to become law. Now, the reckoning begins

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

From the start, U.S. President Donald Trump wanted Congress to deliver a 'big, beautiful' spending bill. The measure approved on a deeply fractured Capitol Hill Thursday was indisputably big.
As for the other word in the President's formula, beauty is in the eyes of the beholders. Or, as Shakespeare taught in Love's Labour's Loss, 'Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,/Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.'
In this case, the chapmen − a term derived from the Middle English word meaning salesman, an apt description of Mr. Trump himself − are the White House officials who demanded the spending and tax cuts in the 1,000-page piece of legislation in a frantic race to meet the President's Independence Day deadline.
What's really in Trump's big spending bill?
But at full flower, this is not an American beauty rose for an unlikely, ungainly collection of lawmakers and activists: The Republican rebels − reluctant warriors wrangled by the President into supporting the package but who remain aghast at the failure to reign in the budget debt; Democrats who again failed to have even a glancing effect on the process or content and revile the US$4.5-trillion in tax cuts, mainly for the wealthy; advocates for the poor recoiling at the cuts in services, especially for the 11 million who may lose health coverage; and Republican strategists who believe that the administration's signature domestic initiative betrays the new GOP constituency of workers.
This isn't a case where the virtue of compromise can be espied in the fact that no one is entirely happy. In this case, no one, beside Mr. Trump and his most loyal subalterns, is the least bit happy.
Except in one dimension: Everyone involved in this monster piece of legislation − which includes work requirements for medical assistance for the poor, tax cuts for employees paid largely in tips, and increased border-security and defence spending − is glad that it is over.
In his landmark 1885 book on Congress, written 28 years before he became president, Woodrow Wilson spoke of 'the dance of legislation,' saying analysts 'must struggle through its mazes as best you can to its breathless end.' This time, the dance was unusually lacking in grace and fluid movement.
'It's especially messy this time because members found ways around the usual legislative discipline,' said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University expert on Congress. 'Republicans found new ways to stretch rules and pack in their priorities. The sausage-making looked especially bad.'
Now, the reckoning begins.
There are massive cuts in food-assistance programs, in health care subsidies, and in federal programs splayed across almost every element of American life, including environmental initiatives to battle climate change.
Though the administration argued that it was an attack on spending and an assault on the estimated US$36-trillion federal debt, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects it adds nearly US$4-trillion to it. Republican rebels were particularly aggrieved by the failure to trim the US$1.3-trillion annual federal deficit.
That's because some of the tax cuts in the budget package are the result of making permanent the temporary reductions in levies passed in the first Trump administration. Additionally, the measure increases the level of state and local taxes Americans can deduct from their net income when preparing their federal tax forms next April.
The details − some arcane, and many barely if at all known to the lawmakers themselves − are examples of how the Trump ascendancy is a radical departure from American tradition.
For all their brave anti-spending rhetoric consistent with the Republican ethos of their respective eras, Dwight Eisenhower didn't dent the Franklin Roosevelt New Deal and though Ronald Reagan shrunk the size of the federal government by about 5 per cent, over-all federal spending in his White House years was up by nearly 70 per cent.
The final days of the negotiations included 16 hours in which the legislation was drearily read aloud in the Senate chamber and a record-breaking 8-hour and 45-minute delaying speech by Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries. They won their party no benefit and only provided the White House more time to placate skeptics.
The end result of the lobbying was a vivid affirmation of the 'all-politics-is-local' aphorism popularized by former House Speaker Thomas 'Tip' O'Neill.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, a key GOP resister, won special nutrition-assistance and medical benefits for her Alaska constituents, while Maine's Susan Collins insisted on raising the level of federal support for rural hospitals, but failed to prevail and ended up opposing the bill.
There were additional dramas playing out as the lawmakers wrestled, wrangled and warred over specific elements of the package.
One was the personal agony of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose resistance to many Trump entreaties won him the enduring enmity of the President.
He finally succumbed to the pressure, which included a classic Trump social-media denunciation of a fellow Republican ('Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!'), and announced he wouldn't seek re-election, thus avoiding a bruising primary against a Trump-endorsed surrogate.
Another was how, in their drive to win approval of the spending package, Republican members of the legislative branch tested the boundaries of rules and customs much the way the President has done in the executive branch. One example: a dodge permitting the extension of the US$3.8-trillion of the tax cuts not to count against the budgetary cost of the bill.
A third was the renewal of the feud between Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, who threatened to start a third party if the legislation were passed.
'Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!' He wrote on his X platform. 'And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.'
The response from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: 'I admire Elon's leadership on rockets. I will take care of the finances.' That, too, will be a matter of contention in this age of contention.