Big Beautiful Budget Bill Battles!
Elon bitches, Reps get amnesia, and the Senate squabbles over how hard to screw the poors.
The Big Beautiful Blowies for Billionaires Bill got passed by the House, and the Senate is working on revisions. Meanwhile, Congressional Budget Office numbers are out, and eesh, it will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, and kick 16 million people off of Medicaid, helping the poor to meet Jesus as soon as possible.
And many other reprehensible things besides enriching billionaires, like weakening the judiciary’s power to check the government, and making it unlegal for any entity to try to regulate AI for a decade. Dok covered all that policy stuff!
Now that the word is out that it does so many repugnant things, some of the House Reps who voted for it (and will have to vote for it again when it comes back from the Senate) are playing illiterate. Rep. Mike Flood sputtered in a town hall that he was unaware of what he’d voted on:
And Marjorie Taylor Greene posted that she hadn’t read it either:
Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years.
I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.
We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous.
This needs to be stripped out in the Senate.
When the OBBB comes back to the House for approval after Senate changes, I will not vote for it with this in it.
We should be reducing federal power and preserving state power.
Not the other way around.
Especially with rapidly developing AI that even the experts warn they have no idea what it may be capable of.
Stopped clock right twice a day and all that! Don’t these people have staff with highlighters? At least Joni Ernst is upfront that she read it and just doesn’t care if people die.
And now Teflon Don and the Ketamine Kid ride together no more. Musk went on CBS News Sunday Morning, a wrung-out dishrag of his former chainsawing, skipping-dipshit former self, nursing a healing shiner and tired Sieg-Heil arm, miffed that the Budget Bill did not enshrine DOGE’s attempt to eliminate every social program.
He intensified his griping on his hellsite,
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
Followed up by, “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to [he meant “by”] $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” And “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”
But you just spent $288 million (plus the cost of Twitter) to help elect them!
Feeling his best buddy’s pain, Trump immediately asked Congress to claw back $9.4 billion of federal funding to reflect some of the cuts already made by DOGE, including taking away funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, USAID, and the WHO, because babies dying of AIDS might make Elon feel a little better about how he failed to find the $2 trillion in cuts he had told everyone he would make with his GrokBot AI.
It did not work, and Musk spent most of Wednesday in a Tweetstorm, all of a sudden very worried about the deficit, even invoking The Bride.
Leave Uma out of this!
The actual disgusting, abominable pork driving up the deficit is, of course, extending tax cuts for multi-millionaires and billionaires, and corporate subsidies for companies like his own, which have taken $38 billion to stay afloat.
Oh, and it phases out carbon tax credits, which Tesla makes hundreds of millions selling. Maybe that’s why Musk is actually mad?
But Musk got a going-home gift basket filled to the brim as thanks for his time traumatizing federal employees and trippin’ balls at the White House: stymied investigations and less oversight for his companies, cha-ching new contracts for himself and family members, and a lifetime golden ticket to influence-peddle in Congress. Elizabeth Warren put out a new report on at least 130 of his business conflicts of interest, any one of which would have sent the GOP into apoplexy if somebody named Biden had been photographed next to him at a cocktail party.
But it cost Musk too, tiny sad violin. Tariffs will hurt his profits. His net worth went from $486 billion in December of 2024 to $330 billion in March, mostly due to Tesla stock plummeting, with institutional investors furiously threatening to unload because Musk hasn’t been tending to company business. Nine of them fired off an angry letter to Tesla’s board insisting they either force him to sit his ass down and do his job, or replace him with somebody who will.
Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs ranted to Forbes: “No other publicly traded company CEO would've been allowed to neglect his day-to-day duties like Musk has. No exception. And if they had undertaken personal activities that hurt the reputation of a company or brand that badly, would they be treated like he has been?”
If any other government employee showed up to work pissing themselves in a k-hole toting a variety bag full of drugs, as the NYT alleges, would they be treated like he has been? He and Dear Leader are the most entitled, kid-glove-treated people on earth, and the world revolves around their feelings.
Mike Johnson said he called Musk on Monday to try to soothe his colic, and claimed Musk had reassured him he’d still help the Republicans keep their majority.
But apparently you can’t rely on a guy who allegedly travels with a grab bag of drugs to be consistent.
Where were we, oh yes, the budget bill! Rand Paul is against it because it will explode the debt. Freedom Caucus ghouls like Ron Johnson and Rick Scott think it doesn’t hurt poor people enough.
And Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Josh Hawley are very concerned that the draconian cuts to Medicaid will enrage their constituents before they kill them. Don’t furrow those brows, though, the cuts are timed to phase in after midterms, so low-information voters won’t know what’s going on until after their local hospital is already gone!
Old Treasonballs lied on his web platform that the bill had “NO CUTS to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid,” though that is plainly untrue, and that he would like the Senate to “get this Bill to MY DESK before the Fourth of JULY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
But right now it doesn’t have the votes, and the more people learn about what’s in that pile of dogshit, the less popular it gets. Will the Senate finish up squabbling about how to fuck over poor people for billionaire breaks in time for a patriotic barbecue at their summer homes? We shall see!
[CBS / AP / NYT gift link]
Trump and Musk are both like this student at my school. A second-grader, he has terrorized everyone all year. He's been in three different classes in '24-'25, so 3/4 of the second grade is traumatized. All year, he has been calling teachers and classmates alike "bitches" and "c-nts" and "fat asses" and putting up his finger. He hit me yesterday because I told him to take off his hood (school rule, but which his homeroom teacher lets him wear). The principal, who made the rule and was very strict about it over the last few years, says nothing. Damned if I'm going to let it go.
This is how people like Trump and Musk happen.
OT:
The woman who shouted "people will die" at Joni Ernst, India May, is a nurse and a librarian who first got involved in politics by going to a town hall about bills aiming to defund libraries.
Now she's running for the Iowa State House.
https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3lqrzhzqgjk2v