As Washington Democratic lawmakers slam 'Big Beautiful Bill,' NW Republicans back it while acknowledging imperfections

Yahoo

5 hours ago

Jun. 9—WASHINGTON — Lawmakers return to the Capitol on Monday with less than a month before Republicans' self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass President Donald Trump's signature bill, extending tax cuts and increasing spending on immigration enforcement and the military while cutting spending on health care and food assistance.
In interviews on Capitol Hill last week, Northwest lawmakers illustrated why passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is proving such a vexing needle to thread, even as nearly all Republicans agree they must pass some version of the legislation this year.
"We have very strong support and we have very strong unity in moving forward to make sure that we don't give America the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, a $4.3 trillion tax increase," said Sen. Mike Crapo, the Idaho Republican crafting the bill's tax provisions as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, after meeting with Trump on Wednesday.
"There's a lot of talk about 'this is a tax cut for the wealthy,'" Crapo told reporters outside the White House. "This is a $2.6 trillion tax increase on people making less than $400,000, and the vast majority of that is for the middle and lower-middle income categories."
The crux of the challenge for the GOP is balancing benefits for the businesses and high-income people who have traditionally been the party's constituents with the interests of the working-class Americans who form the party's base in the Trump era, all while appeasing fiscal conservatives who worry about the nation's debt.
Reading between the lines of Crapo's statement reveals this tension. The bill would extend the sweeping tax cuts Republicans enacted in 2017 during Trump's first term, so taxes would largely stay the same if it passes, with the exception of temporary tax cuts for tips, overtime wages and Social Security income that were central to the president's campaign.
If failing to pass the bill by Dec. 31 would mean a $4.3 trillion tax hike, as Crapo said, including a $2.6 trillion increase on Americans who earn less than $400,000 a year, then the other $1.7 trillion in extended tax cuts would not benefit those people. Meanwhile, the bill passed by House Republicans would reduce future spending on Medicaid by $793 billion and on food assistance for low-income Americans by $294 billion over a decade, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO.
"It is a big, ugly bill that is really bad for our district and really bad for the country," said Rep. Kim Schrier, a Democrat whose district spans the Cascades from Wenatchee to the eastern suburbs of Seattle and Tacoma. "It explodes the debt, and they are taking away from my constituents Medicaid, taking away food stamps, taking away new energy projects in the district, all in order to pay for a tax break for the wealthiest. So this is a lose-lose situation for my constituents."
Growing budget deficits
In his address to a joint session of Congress in March, Trump said Republicans would balance the federal budget, something Congress hasn't done since Bill Clinton was president in 2000. But estimates published last week by the CBO, a nonpartisan agency that analyzes the effects of legislation, project that the GOP bill would do the opposite, increasing budget deficits by $2.4 trillion through 2034 and adding to the nation's debt of more than $36.2 trillion.
For deficit hawks like Rep. Russ Fulcher, a Republican whose district includes North Idaho and most of the Gem State's western half, that's less than ideal.
"I'd like to see some more aggressive reductions on the spending curve," Fulcher said. "But the reality is this is Congress and we got this passed by one vote, and so that tells me that those of us on the fiscal conservative side probably pushed it about as far as we could in the House."
Fulcher opposed a provision in the House bill that gives an extra tax write-off to people in states with high state and local taxes, which he described as forcing Idahoans "to subsidize bad policy in New York and California." He also lamented that federal spending is projected to keep growing, and the GOP bill wouldn't bring spending down, only slow the increase.
"At the end of the day, we did not cut spending overall," Fulcher said, but he ultimately voted for the bill — like all but five House Republicans, while every Democrat voted against it — because he believes it puts the federal budget on a better trajectory. He also supports repealing Biden-era subsidies for low-carbon energy and electric vehicles, another key part of the bill.
"By simply bending the spending curve, I believe that gives the investment community some confidence that leadership is taking the debt seriously, and that's really important when it comes to the bond markets financing our debt," he said. "And when the investment community has confidence, that also promotes economic growth."
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who represents a conservative, largely working-class district in southwest Washington, said many of her constituents hate the idea of future generations having to pay for debt-financed spending in the GOP bill, including a down payment on Trump's "Golden Dome" missile system that CBO estimates could cost as much as $831 billion over two decades.
"Working people deeply, bitterly understand debt," she said. "People care about this much more than the political establishment realizes. Like, we understand that we are mortgaging our future here, and what are we getting for it?"
Gluesenkamp Perez, who has voted with Republicans more often than nearly any other Democrat, said she supports Trump's stated goal of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in government spending but the GOP bill doesn't accomplish that goal. She said she agrees with the president's proposals to raise taxes on the highest earners and close a tax break for Wall Street called the "carried interest loophole," which Republicans in Congress have shot down.
"It's not providing relief from administrative burden and bureaucracy," she said. "It's not empowering people to make better decisions for their long-term health. It's not building national health; it's taking food away from kids. You know, my dad always said that people can talk about their values all day, but you see their tax returns and you know what they really think and care about."
Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican, said he disagrees with the idea Trump reportedly floated in a call with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. — letting the tax rate on people who make at least $2.5 million a year revert from 37% to 39.6% — and said the president hasn't made that a priority in his conversations with congressional Republicans. Baumgartner said that while the GOP bill isn't perfect, he supports it because it would enact the policies Trump ran on.
"The Big Beautiful Bill is not a silver bullet for everything that ails the American republic, but it is very much a fulfillment of President Trump's campaign promises and what the American people voted for," he said. "It is not a plan to balance the federal deficit in one bill. It took decades to create the framework that had a significant imbalance in federal spending, and it's going to take more than one bill to right that ship."
Despite the CBO's projected increase of $2.4 trillion to deficits through 2034, Crapo and other Republicans say their bill won't increase deficits by a penny, relying on projections of increased tax collections from economic growth that critics call wildly unrealistic.
Both parties have disregarded the CBO when its findings haven't suited their policy goals, but the office has historically produced accurate predictions and routinely scrutinizes itself when they miss the mark. Republicans accuse the CBO of underestimating the effects of economic growth spurred by their 2017 tax cuts, but independent analysts point out that higher-than-expected revenue was mostly due to inflation and other effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked if he was concerned about the GOP bill increasing deficits, Baumgartner said the gap between government revenue and spending is already on track to grow because of the rising cost of entitlement programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Solving that problem would take bipartisan action, he said, but the Republicans' bill would be a step in the right direction.
"Those are politically very challenging votes to take," Baumgartner said of reforming safety-net programs. "But eventually the bond market will force the American people, and very likely a presidential campaign. You have to have a presidential campaign where candidates are campaigning on entitlement reform and fiscal responsibility at the presidential level to get the message through to the American people."
Cuts to Medicaid
Wary of the political pitfalls of cutting benefits Americans rely on, Republicans have pitched their reforms to Medicaid and food aid as merely targeting "waste, fraud and abuse" by imposing restrictions designed to prevent noncitizens and able-bodied adults who choose not to work from receiving the funds.
The CBO estimates that 10.9 million people would lose Medicaid coverage as a result of those changes, including 1.4 million noncitizens who currently receive Medicaid funded only by states. Combined with the expiration of expanded subsidies passed by Democrats to help pay for private insurance, which Republicans don't plan to extend, the office estimates that 16 million Americans would lose their health insurance by the end of 2034.
The bill would require recipients to regularly file reports to prove that they qualify for health insurance and help buying groceries. Democrats say that extra paperwork would strip vital benefits from people who deserve them but get tripped up by added bureaucracy.
"The vast majority of people on Medicaid are already working. This bill is just a scam by Republicans to make it so hard to qualify for Medicaid that people just give up," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a virtual news conference on Thursday.
"The Republican tax bill will strangle everyone who relies on Medicaid in red tape, creating more barriers to coverage through intentionally confusing and burdensome new work-reporting requirements that could leave more than 620,000 Washingtonians without health care coverage or delayed coverage," Murray said, citing an estimate by the Washington State Health Care Authority, which administers the state's Medicaid program, called Apple Health.
The CBO has estimated that stricter work-reporting requirements to qualify for Medicaid wouldn't increase employment. When Arkansas imposed such a policy in 2018, it didn't reduce joblessness in the state.
Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Sunnyside, represents a central Washington district where 70% of children rely on Medicaid, the highest rate in the state. Asked why he voted for the bill despite the cuts to Medicaid, he said federal spending on the program is on an unsustainable trajectory.
"We want the program to be viable, to go on into the future being able to provide the service necessary, the medical service for people that absolutely have to have it," Newhouse said. "There are rules in place and we have to follow the law."
The GOP bill would change that law. While federal funds already can't be used to give Medicaid to noncitizens, it would penalize states like Washington that use their own money to provide health insurance to immigrants, including both people living in the country illegally and those with legal status.
Newhouse, whose heavily agricultural district relies largely on unauthorized immigrant farmworkers, said the loss of health insurance among immigrants in central Washington is "going to be an issue that we'll have to address in some way." But he said his party's bill will help keep Medicaid viable in the long term, as spending on the program continues to grow.
Democrats warn that cutting spending on the program won't only affect the people who lose their government-provided health insurance. Leaders of rural hospitals have warned that they could be forced to curtail services or even close due to lost Medicaid revenue, and uninsured patients often delay treatment until they need expensive emergency care.
"Whenever we take away health care from anyone, it puts stress on the entire health care system," said Rep. Marilyn Strickland, D-Tacoma. "They're still going to get health care through the emergency room, so all that's going to do is drive up the expense. They will be far more sick and in dire condition when they show up in the emergency room, and that means longer wait times for everybody."
The Affordable Care Act of 2010, often called "Obamacare," reduced the number of Americans without health insurance by subsidizing private insurance plans and letting states choose to expand Medicaid coverage to a larger share of their population, which Washington did in 2014 and Idaho did in 2020. Republicans have repeatedly tried and failed to repeal that law, coming close during Trump's first term in 2017 before the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., famously killed that effort.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told reporters on Tuesday that by reducing Medicaid coverage and allowing the expanded subsidies to expire, the GOP bill is "literally just another attempt to repeal the advancements of the Affordable Care Act."
"By covering more people, the Affordable Care Act improved access to care, covered millions more Americans and helped us lower costs, but the provisions in the House reconciliation bill will reverse those gains," she said. "And for what? To give a tax break to the ultra-wealthy or to corporations that don't need it."
Sen. Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, said his party faces a difficult balancing act in crafting the bill — especially when they can afford to lose no more than three GOP votes in either the House or Senate — but they ultimately have to get it done to enact Trump's agenda. The bill would also raise the government's borrowing limit by about $4 trillion, which Congress must do before its August recess, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says, or risk a global financial crisis.
"I'm concerned about the deficit every moment of every day," Risch said. "The biggest competing thing you have is the fact that we're going into debt, $1 trillion every 150 days. And on the other side, people are unhappy with the rate of taxation they've got, and those things have got to get reconciled. I think they can, but it's a heavy lift."
Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.