Hey What's In The Big Bad Blowjobs For Billionaires Bill Now?

Parliamentarian killed off massive sale of public lands, but now there's bigger subsidies for fossil fuels.

Excuse me, but what exactly are you people up to? Photo by Philipp Torres on Unsplash

President Pissypants wants his Big Beautiful Blowjobs for Billionaires (Bupkis for Bubbas) Bill on his desk and ready to sign by July 4, so Senate Republicans are hard at work trying to pass enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, boost military spending, and increase spending on “Homeland Security” enough to deport millions of undocumented people. The trick is to cram in a whole lot of stuff that will hurt America while still meeting the funny puzzle rules that will allow the bill to pass by reconciliation, with only a simple majority in both houses of Congress.

There’s a surprising amount of crap congressional Rs are trying to stuff into what’s technically supposed to be a budget bill, so let’s put on our personal protective equipment and take a look. Eye and breathing protection is recommended!

What Washed Out In The ‘Byrd Bath’?

Already, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled out some of the really ugly shit that passed in the House version of the bill, or that was added to the Senate version. Remember, the “Byrd Rule” for reconciliation bills limits them to measures involving taxing and spending; Republicans can’t use reconciliation to, let’s say, repeal the Civil Rights act of 1964 or to declare all Democrats enemies of the State.

There were a surprising number of things that Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDounough, said no to, such as one provision that would have blocked federal courts from finding members of the Trump administration in contempt, and another that would have given states authority to patrol the border and enforce immigration law.

MacDonough also nixed a proposal that would have sold off millions of acres of public land held by the Bureau of Land Management and by the Forest Service, opening them to housing and other development. That brilliant plan to pave paradise and put up a parking lot was the brainchild of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) who says he wants to give it another try, this time just auctioning off BLM land near cities and towns but leaving Forest Service land alone (for now). That too will have to pass MacDonough’s scrutiny; she’ll get to it. Lee might also be open to an alternative scheme to take all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum, and charge the people a dollar an’ a half just to see ‘em.

Also scotched were a measure banning anyone who isn’t a citizen or permanent resident from receiving food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and another one that would have forced states with high rates of processing errors to pick up more of the cost of SNAP.

On top of that, MacDonough saw right through a clever attempt to completely eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by capping its maximum funding at “zero percent of the Federal Reserve’s operating expenses.” See how crafty that was? She sure did, and she pointed out that eliminating an entire federal agency by pretending that it’s a simple budgeting move goes well outside of what’s allowable in a reconciliation bill.

Some Breathing Room For The Environment

It’s really kind of impressive how many “extraneous” environmental measures Republicans put into the bill, only to have them removed by the parliamentarian. (Don’t worry, Big Oil, there’s still plenty of terrible stuff still in there, just for you!) MacDonough ruled out measures that would have:

• Sped up offshore oil and gas drilling project approvals by declaring every single proposal automatically compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

• Required the government to issue offshore drilling permits within 90 days of the bidder winning at auction.

• Ordered the Interior Department to approve construction of a controversial mining road in Alaska, no matter what.

• Allowed developers to fast track NEPA environmental reviews, and to exempt projects from judicial review if the developers paid a one-time fee. That’s a neat trick!

• Forced the Postal Service to sell off its EV fleet and tear out the chargers it’s already installed. But the bill can and does eliminate funding for new EV delivery trucks, forcing USPS to buy gas guzzlers instead as it modernizes its vehicle fleet. (See our earlier piece on that fuck-tussle here!)

Finally — and this is a big win for limiting climate change, at least for now — MacDonough wouldn’t allow the Big Dirty Bill to repeal a bunch of EPA limits on air pollution, including the new passenger-vehicle tailpipe emissions limits that were enacted under Joe Biden. That’s the regulation that tightens vehicle carbon emissions enough that by 2030, around half of manufacturers’ new-car fleets would have to be zero-emissions, although automakers could meet that requirement with a mix of full electric, plug-in-hybrids, or some other technology. This is the measure Donald Trump lied about, calling it an “EV mandate,” even though it still allowed nearly half of new vehicles to run on gas or diesel. Trump and Republicans will still want to kill off EPA emissions limits in every sector possible, but they’ll have to do it by other means, like the normal rule-making process or even by trying to pass a law under regular order. (Haha, we made a joke! )

Terrible New Shit

Beyond the awful stuff ruled out by the parliamentarian, there’s plenty of terrible crap that Senate Republicans have added to their version of the reconciliation bill — and remember, the House version is already horrible. In fact, the Center for American Progress warned this week that, far from moderating the excesses in the House version, the Senate’s Big Bugfuck Billionaire-Boner Bonanza is even more extreme. Let us count the ways the Senate version is even worse:

1. Food Aid: On top of the $267 billion in cuts to SNAP the House passed, the Senate added in provisions that will pile on new paperwork “work requirements” for veterans (who had been exempted until 2030 when Rs forced those requirements as part of the 2023 debt ceiling agreement). Homeless people were also exempted. But now, the Senate bill will end those exemptions early, so roughly 1.2 million vets and another million people experiencing homelessness will now have to provide documentation that they work 20 hours a week, or they’ll lose the pittance in food aid they now qualify for. There are limited exemptions, like disability or being a full-time caretaker, but those too have to be documented. Failure to jump through the paperwork will kick people off SNAP for three years, and forcing people to lose benefits is of course the real point of these phony work requirements anyway. But cheer up! Veterans who are homeless won’t have to provide two sets of work documents, just one! The work documentation exemption is also being stripped away from young people who age out of foster care (until they turn 24), so the roughly 20,000 people who age out of foster care and have a far higher unemployment rate than other youth will be hungry on top of being slammed, ready or not, into adulthood.

2. Even MORE People Lose Healthcare: The Senate bill actually manages to make the already terrible House cuts to healthcare worse. As it is, the bill’s Medicaid work requirements and cuts to Obamacare subsidies will force 11 million people to lose healthcare coverage over the next decade — but don’t forget, when you add in new ACA regulations outside the bill, the total is more like 16 million people losing healthcare by 2034. The Senate somehow managed to find one more place it could kick poor families: Where the House version exempts parents of dependent kids from the Medicaid work requirement, the Senate eliminated that exemption, so the resulting paperwork burden is likely to kick an additional 160,000 to 380,000 folks off Medicaid over a decade. But hey, poor kids shouldn’t have healthcare when billionaires need tax cuts.

3. Let’s Fuck Over Medicaid Expansion More: This one is a bit complicated, but basically it adds additional limits to how much states can tax healthcare providers to help pay for states’ share of Medicaid. The Senate limits that even more than the House did, but only for the 40 states that expanded Medicaid as part of the ACA. We guess that’s to punish them for joining Obamacare. The upshot is that states will have less to spend on Medicaid, and people will suffer. The loss of Medicaid funding could force closures of hundreds of rural hospitals, and we still don’t know what the final outcome of the measure will be. It’s one of several items that could kill the bill in one house or the other.

4. Shitty Changes To College Aid: Both versions of the Big Breaks For Buggersome Bastards Bill seek to take revenge on higher education and on people with student loans, to get even with Joe Biden for having forgiven a LOT of student debt, even if his plans to do even more were thwarted in the courts. To make future students suffer for what Biden did, the House bill would have made colleges pay a portion of the loan balance for former students who don’t make payment on their loans. The Senate removed that provision, but substituted a threat to cut off loan eligibility for schools whose graduates don’t end up with higher incomes than the median income in their states. (Enforcing either “accountability” approach would be next to impossible without a well-staffed Department of Education, but killing that department is a separate fight.) Both versions limit Pell Grants for low-income students, but in different shitty ways — the Senate version is slightly less sucky there.

   On student loans, the House bill would have ended subsidized loans for undergrads and capped lifetime student loan borrowing limits; the Senate version is a bit more generous, but not by much: It keeps subsidized loans and caps borrowing, but the annual and lifetime caps are higher. Both eliminate the “Grad PLUS” loan program and limit Parent PLUS loans, but by different amounts.

   The biggest kick in the teeth is aimed at making sure almost no one ever has any portion of their student loan balance forgiven. Fortunately, shortly before we published today, the parliamentarian ruled that this new fuckery can only be imposed on new borrowers; existing borrowers can still repay loans (and have a portion of their balance forgiven) under current Income-Driven Repayment plans.

   For new borrowers, if this shit bill passes, repayment plans would be narrowed to two options: “a standard plan with fixed payments spanning 10 to 25 years and an income-driven repayment plan with payments amounting to 1-10% of borrowers’ earnings.” The term for the income-driven plan would be up to 30 years, which higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz says amounts to “indentured servitude.” Only then would the remaining balance be forgiven, unless of course all the paperwork is lost. The only good news here, again, is that existing borrowers can’t be forced into the new, shitty repayment regime.

   (For more in-depth looks at the terrible things the House and Senate bills will do to federal student aid, see these stories at Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive.)

5. Billions More In Benefits For Big Oil: It wouldn’t be a GOP budget bill without a bunch of subsidies for fossil fuels, so in addition to the House version’s repeal of most of the clean energy provisions in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the Senate bill adds in all sorts of new goodies for oil and gas companies, including giving them a huge tax break for “carbon capture” — but only if they take that CO2 and use it to force more oil out of near-depleted oil wells. So environmental!

6. More Deadly Weapons In Our Communities? You Bet! The House version of the reconciliation bill already gave a tongue bath to the National Rifle Association by dropping the current $200 tax on purchases of gun silencers. The Senate said “Hold my beer while I grab this short-barreled shotgun or rifle, or other weapons requiring a federal firearms license, including exotic toys like ‘pen guns, cigarette lighter guns, and umbrella guns!’” and then removed the $200 tax on those as well. Since it’s a reconciliation bill, they couldn’t remove the licensure requirement on those weapons altogether, but they would if they could. In addition, the bill now preempts state and local regulation of all those neat guns, which sounds to us like a non-tax measure the parliamentarian should take a close look at.

Just to be pricks about it, the Senate added those tax breaks for guns just two days after the political assassination (and attempted assassination) of Democrats in Minnesota.

We should add that Republican senators from red states, which have seen increased jobs in clean energy resulting from the IRA’s clean energy provisions, just might offer some good news on the climate front. Or not! It’s still very much up in the carbon-saturated air, as the New York Times reports (gift link).

The House version of the bill eliminated the hundreds of billions of tax incentives from the IRA on a very short timeline. But quite a few red-state Republicans, with an eye to keeping their seats in 2026 or 2028, want to phase out the tax incentives — especially those that help green energy businesses in their states — a bit more slowly, past the next two election cycles, so they won’t have to answer for the huge job losses that’ll result from eliminating those credits.

What? You didn’t think they were thinking about climate at all, did you? It’s purely political self-preservation for these assholes.

As the Times notes, “roughly $1.4 billion in [planned] electric-vehicle, battery and solar-panel factories” have already been cancelled in May alone because companies expect the IRA’s tax credits to vanish. The total cancellations so far this year come to about $15.5 billion, and they’re coming mostly in red states that had, up to now, been booming.

The slow-things-down Republican senators are self-interested assholes, but they’re pitted against even bigger assholes who want the cuts to come as soon as possible, to partly offset the enormous costs of the bill’s $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for needy billionaires and corporations. The latter set of assholes also make the point that it’s urgent to eliminate everything in the IRA while Republicans still have the presidency and Congress, because any climate progress not rooted out entirely during Trump’s final term (or second first term) could be revived if Americans get sick of the fascism and can still vote the fuckers out.

In conclusion, there’s still a lot of terrible shit Republicans are fighting over, and it’s still entirely possible this whole fucking mess might fail thanks to the GOP’s terminal dysfunction. There’s no agreement yet on the Medicaid provisions that could kill rural hospitals, or on how the Senate may modify the deduction for state and local taxes. If we’re lucky, the whole wretched mess may fall apart, but we’re not getting our hopes up. We’ll keep you posted.

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Oh No, Betsy DeVos Forgot To Murder The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program :(

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[The Hill / Flathead Beacon / Center for American Progress / Inside Climate News / Inside Higher Ed / Higher Ed Dive / NYT (gift link) / NPR]

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