Republican Senators Working Today To Hurt America Like Never Before!
This just in, Trump's Big Bucks for Billionaires bill still blows. Watch the Senate live!
Good morning, how goes that wretched billionaire giveaway bill in the House? They’re still debating amendments but hope to vote on the biggest wealth transfer in American history real soon! Since the bill passed the House, its cost has gotten even bigger, and it’s now expected to balloon the deficit by $3.3 trillion-with-a-T over 10 years, not counting the borrowing cost of financing, which is high because it’s deficit financing, funded by borrowed money, instead of through taxes or other revenue. That’s sort of like if you took out a home equity loan to pay off your credit cards and then did not pay off the credit cards, but went on a spending spree with the “windfall” instead.
The Senate parliamentarian nixed a lot of stuff that Republicans tried to cram through that went beyond its tax-and-spend powers, like selling off public land, eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), banning anyone who isn’t a citizen or permanent resident from receiving food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), repealing a bunch of EPA limits on air pollution, and forcing the Postal Service to sell off its EV fleet. Dok has a rundown!
PREVIOUSLY!
Also nixed, an attempt to bribe encourage Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to support the bill by exempting Alaska and Hawaii from Medicaid cuts. Will she still support it anyway? We’ll see! (She voted to advance the bill on Saturday night.)
About those Medicaid cuts, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis is apparently the only Republican not trying to maintain the lie that the cuts do not exist. He announced he was not running for re-election, and then went scorched-ass last night.
“So what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore? Guys in the White House advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”
How sweetly naive of him to assume that any of them give a crap. Indeed, that’s maybe the grimmest part of the bill, the $1.1 trillion cut to health benefits cuts that will take health care away from an estimated 12 million people and close hundreds of hospitals, but will phase in after midterms. Some 63 percent of Americans do not want this, but Republicans are banking on people forgetting all about it until it’s too late.
Why is this thing so expensive? Extending $4 trillion in tax cuts to billionaires is the biggest-ticket item, followed by increasing the standard deduction and business tax breaks. But the mass deportation agenda is the other big one. The bill gives ICE and border security more than sixteen times as much money than it gets now, boosting its budget from $10 billion to $168.9 billion, for shit like building that stupid southern border wall that Trump has been moaning about since his last term. The funding increase would make ICE’s budget double that of the entire US prison system.
How comforted rural Republicans will be to know while dying of a heart attack on the way to a hospital two towns away that immigrants are suffering in a sweltering Florida tent city! Worth it to own the libs!
And by the way, extending the 2017 tax cuts should be against the rules, but Republicans are just ignoring that part and making it legal through the magic of pretending. From the New York Times, Senate Republicans are:
invoking an alternative accounting method that wipes away the cost of extending tax cuts already in place. Republicans argue that the tax cuts they originally passed in 2017, which expire at the end of the year, should be baked into the country’s fiscal forecasts even though Congress has not yet actually renewed them. By that logic, the $3.8 trillion cost of extending the 2017 cuts is zero, and those cuts can be extended for decades even though reconciliation’s rules prohibit long-term deficit increases.
Incredible!
Also still in the bill, a tax on university endowment income, to as high as 21 percent. Plus, tighter eligibility rules for the child tax credit, which would take the benefit away from the parents of about two million children. And Medicaid work requirements. Never mind that 92 percent of non-disabled people on Medicaid are already working, and these requirements have been shown time and again to not increase employment; instead they just kick people off for not having their paperwork in order, and cost states millions to administer. But the cruelty, priceless!
Also still in there, the prohibition on states passing their own laws to regulate artificial intelligence, though it is now a “temporary five-year pause” with “new exemptions for state laws seeking to regulate unfair or deceptive practices, children’s online safety, child sexual abuse material and publicity rights.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, has spoken out against the AI provision:
Agreeing with her is so weird. Will this compromise please her when it gets back to the House?
If the Senate manages to pass this pie of flaming poo today, the BBB will return to the House, which may or may not approve of the changes so that Big Daddy can get his deal before the Fourth of July.
It’s looking increasingly less likely, but we shall see.
Today is a good day to watch the Senate on television. The Vote-A-Rama just got going!
Unbelievable.
[Politico / Washington Post / PBS]
No.
I will not watch the Senate live, and I don't even have to think about that idea.
It's a waste of my time, changes nothing, and just makes me despair a little more.
Fucking ghouls. Sadistic ghouls. Sorry, that's all I've got today other than inchoate, incandescent rage.