A Senate Vote on the Billionaire Big Beautiful Budget Bill?
“I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it." -- Sen. Mitch McConnell
With President Donald Trump’s July 4 deadline drawing near, Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he believes the Senate is “on a path” to start voting on the megabill Friday. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the version the House passed would add $2.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.
Senate tax writers are proposing a package that’s hundreds of billions of dollars more costly than what House Republicans have proposed, so Senators are struggling to finalize a larger package of spending cuts to offset it.
The core values embedded in either budget bill involve facilitating the largest upward transfer of wealth in history through reverse-progressive taxation, and paying some of that cost through reductions in government health programs. (Medicare, Medicaid, VA healthcare, and programs serving Native Americans.)
House Speaker Mike Johnson is warning in private that Senate Republicans could cost the House GOP its majority next year if they try to push through deeper Medicaid cuts. He’s gone public with the Really Big Lie about the budget bill:
"We are not cutting Medicaid. The president has said that and I have said that. We're all said that. We're strengthening the program."
In a closed door meeting on Tuesday, former Senate leader Mitch McConnell urged his GOP colleagues to stop worrying so much about the rising tide of constituents protesting the planned Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" of tax favoritism for the wealthy.
He gave a short speech saying 'failure is not an option,' adding “I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it."
A study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine makes the case for the cuts not being so easy to live with. Literally. It says the budget under consideration could lead to between 8,000 and nearly 25,000 preventable deaths.
Harvard Medical School and the City University of New York’s Hunter College researchers have calculated the health harms that would affect an estimated more than 7 million people who, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would lose their Medicaid coverage in the short run. Over a ten year period, the CBO says cuts to Medicaid could lead to 16 million people losing health care coverage. They also said more than 1 million people would incur medical debt, with roughly a quarter-million people being refused treatment because of such debts.
“Implementing the current House bill would lead to 1.9 million people losing their personal physician, 1.3 million forgoing needed medications, and [380,270] women going without a mammogram.”
The House version of the bill cuts Medicaid by $793 billion and mostly proposes procedural changes having the effect of ending assistance to worthy applicants.
The other Big Lie about the Big Beautiful Budget is Trump’s assertion that “millions” of people illegally residing in the country are receiving Medicaid assistance.
Via FactCheck.org:
Medicaid is a joint federal-state government program that provides health coverage for low-income individuals and families. People living in the U.S. illegally are not eligible to receive Medicaid benefits other than for emergency medical services.
“A state funded program is by definition not Medicaid,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us in an email.
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If you haven’t already figured it out, understand that when (most) politicians of either party project an impact to the “economy,” that’s code for the interests of the wealthy.
Sen John Kennedy of Louisiana warned that the economy would crash like “a fat guy on a seesaw” if the bill’s tax cuts – largely enjoyed by the wealthiest Americans – were not extended.
Although tax reductions for the wealthy have never yielded promised results, the Treasury Secretary has revived that old saw, promising that the One Big Beautiful Bill won't drive up the deficit: "It's through growth, and we are constraining spending and bringing that down. So, the trajectory of the deficit to GDP will change."
A Congressional Budget Office dynamic score of the tax bill found virtually no additional long-term economic growth. Instead, the trillions in added debt drags down growth. There are no credible economic modelers that have found otherwise.
Seriously, the only thing that’s ever happened with a so-called economy boosting tax cut is that the upper end of the economic scale ends up paying less in taxes.
This bill is so backwards that even a tax provision included to help families, an increase in the child tax credit, will block the neediest households from receiving new benefits while piling on more aid for those with higher incomes.
While its passage by July 4 is not assured (even though the majority leader says they won’t leave the floor until it passes), Senate Republicans will keep trying to pass the Project 2025 inspired budget until such time as any more than three holdout votes cave, likely after White House vitriol and the usual death threats brought on by daring to displease the President. Democrats will have no say on the matter.
On Tuesday, President Trump urged lawmakers to stay in session until the bill is passed. “NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Majority Leader John Thune appears on the verge of daring fiscal hawks to stand in the way of Trump’s top legislative priority. It’s now highly probable that the Senate version of the budget proposal will be sufficiently different to require another vote in the House of Representatives.
With the reconciliation process (avoiding a super majority threshold) requiring alignment with actual items to be funded, several parts of the Trump-administration blessed measure have been excluded from consideration.
Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has already ruled that the sell-off of public lands is a no-go for this bill, and has concerns over an accounting maneuver that zeroes out the costs of $3.8 trillion of expiring tax cuts.
An adverse ruling on the accounting could send Republicans back to the drawing board on making the tax cuts permanent. Or they could venture into uncharted territory, choosing to override or ignore MacDonough altogether.
The Trump administration has already shown a willingness to test guardrails. Voiding the process of narrowing a budget reconciliation bill, would absolutely prove the Senate has been effectively neutered and is no longer willing to carry out its responsibilities as a check on executive power.
Snake Venom, Urine, and a Quest to Live Forever: Inside a Biohacking Conference Emboldened by MAHA by Will Bahr at Wired
There are other, better ways to transform health care, of course—ways that could lastingly help the millions who can afford neither chemotherapy nor a cryochamber—like universal health care, stronger regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, and a system more focused on preventative medicine. But these reforms will take political courage and considerable time. Instead we find ourselves entrenched ever further in a culture war, with politicians placing science in its crosshairs.
This, at its core, is the biohackers’ dilemma. Over and over at the Fairmont, I hear of the need for evidence-based science in medicine: for clinical trials and citations in the JAMA and double-blind placebo tests. In practically the same breath, I hear the vehement dismissal of evidence using those very safeguards—such as those used to develop vaccines—when it doesn’t square with the biohackers’ ideals. Though “Live Beyond 180” is a sleek-enough slogan for this crowd, another strikes me as equally fitting: “Science is dead, long live science.”
“The bottom line,” Dr. Fab says, “is that anybody can actually put up a booth and actually sell whatever they feel. That’s where an informed consumer is the key.”
But that’s a hell of an ask. Information, as we know all too well by now, ain’t what it used to be.
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Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice via The Onion Editorial Board (heh, heh)
It won’t be easy, but you must search deep within yourself and muster up every ounce of gutlessness you have. Then, bend over and lick the president’s boots.
Why? Because ultimately none of this matters. Democracy? Equality? The U.S. Constitution? These are hollow phrases. They mean nothing. But money—delicious money? That is solid. You can hold it in your hands. You know this. We know this, too. Only our infantile citizenry fail to appreciate how much you stand to gain by kissing the ring.
In our nation’s darkest moments, the public often looks to Congress for profiles in meekness. We search for men and women much like yourselves, emotional weaklings who are afraid to meet their own glance in the mirror, insignificant do-nothings who quake in their boots at the mention of the slightest exertion. Many of you have already distinguished yourselves as such individuals. To them, our country’s oligarchs can only offer their boundless thanks.
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Elon Musk Gives Anti-Semites a Chance to Rewrite History by Dr. Caroline Orr Bueno at Weaponized
Elon Musk announced recently that he plans to use his AI system, Grok, to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge”, an Orwellian task which he quickly outsourced to his X followers, asking them to contribute “divisive facts for Grok training.” These facts, he said, should be ”things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
Almost immediately, Musk‘s followers started responding with a variety of alternative facts – a.k.a. falsehoods – that they believe should become our new reality, including disinformation about vaccines, gender identity, and climate change.
But it didn’t stop there.
Before long, the replies to Musk’s tweet started filling up with Holocaust deniers hoping to write the Holocaust right out of history and erase the millions of Jews who were murdered in the mass extermination plot.
