Keller: Rep. Katherine Clark shares her thoughts on Trump's "big beautiful bill"
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
Voters don't always expect their political leaders to act benignly. They are often called on to "fight" for various things, "get tough" on crime or other issues, and so on.
But you rarely hear folks clamoring for cruelty from their elected officials. Yet that's exactly what House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Fifth District) said her Republican counterparts are up to with their so-called "big beautiful bill" cutting taxes and budgets.
In an interview with WBZ-TV, Clark said "it was very obvious from early on in the President's term that this was the play, huge cuts, historic cuts to health care, especially the Medicaid program. And then they were going to go after food programs, school lunches, Meals on Wheels, Women and Infants food programs, all to pay for tax breaks for the 900 billionaires in this country. And then on top of it, what we've seen is they also are adding almost $3 trillion to our deficit."
The bill drew fire from some House GOP members before passing with near-unanimous partisan support and being shipped to the Senate, where a similar process is now underway. But Clark said she finds criticisms from Republican representatives and senators hollow.
"We have different members of the House Republican Party saying, 'I can't go along with how big these Medicaid cuts are,' right? Then they vote for it. We have different members who say the cuts aren't large enough, I can't expand the deficit like this, but they fall in line. And this is an established pattern that is so harmful to the American people."
Clark said she believes many of her Republican colleagues believe they are vulnerable to political backlash.
"I think they are ducking for cover in a lot of these situations. I think the object here is to not focus on the cruelty and not level with the American people. We've seen members of the House write letters to the speaker saying, 'I could never support these cuts to Medicaid,' and now what we're seeing is that's expanded. They're cutting Medicare by half a trillion dollars, Medicaid by $800 billion. That's 16 million people when you add up the cuts to Medicaid, the ACA program, the children's insurance program, 16 million Americans they are kicking off of health care and for what? Not for some common good. But when people are telling us that they're not making it, 60% of American households are struggling to meet the basic needs for their family, how do we create jobs by taking away health care and taking away food programs?"
And the second-ranking House Democrat said she believes the Republicans will pay a political price after promising during the campaign to focus on improving the economic status of voters.
"They have gone a 180, the exact opposite," said Clark. "They have betrayed their own voters. They said cost of living is what we're going to address on day one. And between this horrendous bill and what we're seeing with tariffs, we are going to see a marked increase in cost of living for the American people. I don't know what their political view of this is, but it is an incredibly cruel bill, and it's saying to the American people that the Republican Party doesn't value them and is not going to work for them."
Clark also discussed the state of play on issues of housing and child care, and the ability of her office to engage with the executive branch in the interview.
Keller @ Large Part 2:
Keller at Large airs every Sunday at 8:30 a.m. on WBZ-TV.
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