They Didn't Have to Do This

The Atlantic

4 days ago

In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters' respect and being brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor of proceeding: 'Let's do it before the crank wears off.' After that, things go as you might expect.
Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe it is to question its authors' sanity. As of today's 50–50 Senate vote, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie, the House and Senate have passed their own versions of the bill. The final details still have to be negotiated, but the foundational elements are clear enough. Congress is about to impose massive harm on tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance, reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.
Given that President Donald Trump and the GOP, unlike the morons in The Sopranos, are not collectively under the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises: Why are they doing this?
Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing, rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the distant future.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3 trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.
Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater, reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public's moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.
Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy talk. During a pep rally to psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off, Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn't mind. 'We're cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you're not going to feel any of it,' he explained.
Trump was nodding at the claim that cuts to health-care subsidies and food assistance would be limited to fraudulent beneficiaries and other waste. Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no conceivable world in which it could be true. Even if $1.7 trillion worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.
Jonathan Chait: The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid
In reality, the megabill will take food assistance away from some 3 million Americans, while causing 12 million to lose their health insurance. That is how you save money: by taking benefits away from people. Congress is not finding magical efficiencies. To the contrary, the bill introduced inefficiencies by design. The main way it will throw people off their health insurance is by requiring Medicaid recipients to show proof of employment. States that have tried this have found the paperwork so onerous that most people who lose their insurance are actually Medicaid-eligible, but unable to navigate the endless bureaucratic hassle. The end result will be to punish not only the millions of Americans who lose Medicaid, but also the millions more who will pay an infuriating time tax by undergoing periodic miniature IRS audits merely to maintain access to basic medical care.
Another source of cost savings in the megabill involves killing tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy. Because renewables supply some 90 percent of new energy capacity in the United States, and because electricity demand is rising dramatically, these components of the bill will raise household costs, with the highest spikes hitting Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and South Carolina, which have huge wind and solar resources.
Perhaps the most severe political risk of the megabill is the potential for setting off a debt crisis. Rising deficits can cause interest rates to rise, which forces the government to borrow more money to pay the interest on its debt, which in turn puts even more upward pressure on rates, in a potentially disastrous spiral. This prospect is far from certain, but should it come to pass, it would dwarf the other harms of the bill.
You'd think sheer venal self-interest, if nothing else, would cause members of the Republican majority to hesitate before wreaking havoc on multiple economic sectors. Yet none of these outcomes has given them pause.
One explanation is that they don't understand just how unpopular the bill is apt to be when it takes effect. Many Republicans rely on party-aligned media for their news, and these sources have mostly cheerled the bill while ignoring its downsides. Both chambers of Congress have rushed the bill through with minimal scrutiny, shielding members from exposure to concerns. Even the White House seems unaware of what exactly it's pressuring Congress to do. On Monday, when a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the megabill's proposed tax on wind and solar energy, she appeared totally unfamiliar with the measure and punted the question. (The tax provision was later removed.)
When the Affordable Care Act passed, 15 years ago, Republicans protested that the law had been rushed through Congress. That was not true: The ACA was painstakingly shaped over the course of a year. But the attack seems to have revealed a belief among Republicans that speed and secrecy are political advantages that a shrewd party would employ. They have utilized this method to stampede members of Congress into enacting sweeping social change with minimal contemplation.
The second explanation is that Republicans in Congress, or at least some of them, do understand the consequences of their actions, and are willing to accept the political risk because they truly believe in what they're doing. Republicans have, after all, spent decades fighting to reduce the progressivity of the tax code and to block the expansion of guaranteed health care for people unable to purchase it on their own.
The third explanation is that the political logic of doing the president's bidding has created an unstoppable momentum. Trump has been flexible on the specifics of the legislation. (He floated slightly raising the top tax rate on the rich, to disarm a Democratic attack on it, only for Republicans in Congress to shoot him down.) His sine qua non for the bill is that it be big and beautiful. Using Trumpian lingo to label the bill was a clever decision to brand it as a Trump bill rather than to identify the measure by its much less popular contents.
Annie Lowrey: A big, bad, very ugly bill
Trump has accordingly treated internal dissent ruthlessly. When Elon Musk denounced the bill for blowing up the debt and cutting energy technology, Trump threatened to cut Musk's federal subsidies (subsidies that, curiously enough, he had no previous objection to maintaining). When Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina criticized the bill's Medicaid cuts, Trump threatened to back a primary challenger in next year's midterms. Tillis immediately announced he will not seek reelection.
Republicans in Congress have grumbled, occasionally trying to exert leverage to force policy changes. But, with rare exceptions, they have never entertained the prospect of actually opposing Trump's big, beautiful bill. Their criticism begins from the premise that its passage is necessary. They keep repeating the phrase 'Failure is not an option,' a mantra that seems designed to prevent them from considering the possibility that passing the bill could be worse than the alternative. Senator Josh Hawley wrote a New York Times op-ed opposing Medicaid cuts, then fell in line. 'This has been an unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid,' he told NBC News, referring to an effort that he then personally participated in by voting in favor of the bill.
Or perhaps Republicans in Washington have simply grown inured to Trump-era warnings of catastrophe, which have blared for a decade on end, with accelerating frequency during the second Trump term. Trump has gone to war with the global economy, unilaterally slashed huge swaths of the government, threatened to imprison his enemies, and so on, and yet these affronts never quite bring the widespread devastation—and public revolt—that Trump's critics warn of. One gets the sense that elected Republicans have stopped listening.
They have picked a bad time to let their guard down, however, because this bill is different. One way is that legislation, unlike executive action, is not subject to the TACO principle. Once a law has been passed, Trump can't just quietly back down. The other is that they will all have cast a vote for it. An angry public won't merely blame Trump. The ignominy for the disaster will fall upon its authors.