The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate
I'm taping this introduction on Tuesday, July 1. The Senate passed Donald Trump's 'big beautiful bill' just moments ago in a 50-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance as the tiebreaker.
This bill is a bad piece of legislation — trillions of dollars in tax cuts, very much tilted toward the rich, with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and green energy. Even with those cuts, we can expect more than $3 trillion to be added to the national debt over 10 years.
And befitting a policy like that, the bill is hugely unpopular: A poll from late June found nearly two-to-one opposition to the bill. Vulnerable Republicans do not seem excited to run on the wreckage it's going to create. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina — a state Trump has won over and over again — just announced he's stepping down at the end of this term, in part over the Medicaid cuts.
But bad policy only matters if people know about it, and a lot of people don't. Those of us hearing about this bill — even those of us covering it — can't keep the whole package in mind. The Times has a great list of nearly all the provisions, and a lot of them would be major policy fights on their own.
But in part because of that — and because the Trump administration is flooding the zone with so many other major policy fights — it has been hard to focus attention on what is passing and what can actually be done about it.
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