We have now reached the mandatory portion of any Republican budget debate where the most bellicose “deficit hawks” temporarily block progress so they can make a big show of complaining that the legislation’s draconian cuts to social services aren’t big enough. Somehow, they never make that complaint about military spending, which is always increased. The script requires these few brave protectors of the nation’s taxpayers to say it pains them to hold up the bill, but they cannot in good conscience vote for such profligate spending, because they were sent to Washington to clean things up. Then there will be some wrangling, leadership will agree to add a couple measures that will make life harder for single mothers, and the bill will pass without substantial changes.
There, we have saved you from having to pay too much attention to the next few steps in the legislative process for the Republicans’ enormous tax cuts for billionaires reconciliation bill, which on Friday failed to pass in the House Budget Committee when five Republicans joined all the Democrats on the committee to vote against it, with a final vote tally of 16 to 21. They’ll eventually pass the fucking thing, though, to give billionaires a tax cut and further cut up the social safety net.
Now, let’s talk about the second season of “Andor,” shall we?
We have been informed that we actually do have to write about the performative “this cannot stand” pissiness of the small bloc of rightwingers who blocked the bill from moving forward. Just as well. The first season was better.
First, an overview: The top goal of the GOP bill, which is designed to pass through the “reconciliation” process so it won’t face a filibuster in the Senate, is to make permanent many of the huge tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017. Remember, it was the only significant legislation of Trump’s first term. To meet the weird requirements of the reconciliation process, those cuts were designed so that most of them would expire this year, in a pretense of not adding too much to the national debt. (Had Kamala Harris won, her plan was to extend only the lower tax rate cuts on people with family income less than $400,000 a year, the highest reaches of the middle class, and let most other cuts expire.)
In addition to that, the bill adds a bunch of new tax cuts, like Trump’s promised exemptions of taxes on tipped income and overtime wages, and expands the kinds of tax exemptions that only businesses pay any attention to, like allowing businesses to pay less tax on income they make in foreign countries.
It would also increase the amount of state and local taxes (SALT) that individuals can deduct on their income taxes, although the size of that deduction is among the items being fought over, with deficit hawks demanding the smallest SALT deduction and Republicans from blue states holding out for larger deductions, in hopes that will help them hang onto their seats in the 2026 midterms.
On the spending side, the bill substantially boosts the Pentagon’s budget and spending for immigration enforcement, including more money for WALL, for ICE agents, and other stuff.
To offset some of the enormous costs of those tax cuts, the bill makes huge cuts to Medicaid and to food assistance through WIC and SNAP, wipes out virtually all of the clean energy tax credits from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and makes big cuts all across the social safety net and other non-defense spending, including slashing aid for education at every level.
All told, despite eviscerating the nice things we spend money on, the bill would add at least $3.8 trillion in debt over 10 years. But like the 2017 bill, to make the math work within what’s allowed under a reconciliation bill, quite a few of the tax cuts are set to expire before 10 years. Republicans of course want to make those permanent down the line, so if they remain in power and can make ‘em stick, the total jumps to $5.3 trillion in deficit spending over the next 10 years.
The performative outrage was led by Rep. Chip Roy, who was mad that many of the more draconian budget cuts won’t kick in until after the midterms, or in the case of imposing work requirements to throw people off Medicaid health insurance, not until 2029, just in case we have another presidential election. Roy complained that the bill had “front loaded” new spending and “back-loaded” the spending cuts that would partly offset the tax goodies but also be politically unpopular.
“I have to now admonish my colleagues on this side of the aisle. This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits,” Roy said. “That’s the truth. Deficits will go up in the first half of the 10-year budget window and we all know it’s true. And we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t say that we’re doing something we’re not doing.”
Well look at that, Chip Roy said something true.
The five holdouts are especially grumpy that the bill in its current form doesn’t chop out help for low-income people quickly enough, and that it also doesn’t immediately end the IRA’s clean energy manufacturing credits that have created a manufacturing jobs boom in red states. This is because they are sociopaths.
Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina), was outraged that punitive work requirements for people on Medicaid won’t kick in until 2029. Remember, work requirements don’t create permanent jobs, do kick eligible people off the program, and result in higher cost to states, but hey, they hurt the people Republicans want to hurt. Norman, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients already work, griped, “We’re telling a healthy body, a healthy American, that you’ve got four years to get a job,” so there was his 30 seconds on the local news back home.
Other Republicans, like Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, were angry that the bill won’t wipe out jobs in clean energy soon enough, simply because they hate the idea of anything but fossil fuels generating energy. Pointing proudly to his efforts to kill wind energy tax credits in the Oklahoma state Lege — never mind that Oklahoma is the nation’s third largest generator of electricity from wind — Brecheen fretted that if Biden’s clean energy tax credits aren’t wiped out immediately, they’ll never be rolled back, and wouldn’t having more clean energy be horrible?
How exactly the bill might get cobbled together in a way that’ll partly satisfy the budget dudes without pissing off the “moderates” who hope they won’t be defeated in 2026 remains to be seen, but it’s likely to be some combination of moving forward the Medicaid cruelty and the end of clean energy credits, combined with slightly higher caps on the SALT deduction. In any case, Donald Trump will keep huffing and puffing that the Big Beautiful Billionaires must have their Blowjobs Bill before Memorial Day, or at least before his absolutely necessary $45 million birthday military parade in June. The House Pubes will reach some sort of ideal amount of budget cruelty and they’ll all get back in the tent, then send the mess to the Senate so it can go through a second round of Deficit Hawk Kabuki.
Hey, look, we’ve already got a draft for that piece!
Americans Refuse To Quietly Let Republicans Kill Medicaid, People On Medicaid
Republicans Release Budget Plan. It’s A Cookbook!
Republicans Once More Fixin’ To Let Babies Go Hungry, But In America This Time
[NBC News / NYT / Bipartisan Policy Center / WaPo]
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