Soon after Senator Lisa Murkowski coughed up the 50th vote for the Senate version of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, she told reporters what was wrong with it.
“I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country, when you look to Medicaid and SNAP,” she said, referring to the bill’s deep cuts to health care and food assistance. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill’s onerous provisions would directly strip health coverage from 11.8 million people by 2034, and the omission of any extension for Joe Biden-era health-care tax credits would deny coverage for another 5.1 million, for a total of 16.9 million. And according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “more than 5 million people—about 1 in 8 SNAP participants…would be at risk of losing at least some of their food assistance” because of the Republican “red-tape-laden, ineffective work requirement. ” For its part, the Congressional Budget Office predicts 2 million people will lose SNAP benefits altogether because of the work requirement.
“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” Murkowski admitted before passing the buck, “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet”
Several days before his capitulation on the bill, Senator Josh Hawley lamented his party’s fixation with Medicaid cuts: “We can’t be cutting health care for working people and for poor people to constantly give special tax treatment to corporations and other entities.” The thin justification for his vote was that the Senate version delayed implementation of the Medicaid cuts for a year. Hawley said after the vote, “I will continue to do everything in my power to reverse future cuts to Medicaid.” (Like Murkowski, he possessed the power to stop the cuts now, by not voting for the bill, and chose not to.)
One Republican concerned about the impact of health care cuts on humans who didn’t capitulate was Senator Thom Tillis, who not only voted “No” but concluded he could no longer stomach a re-election campaign. Noting that President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted he wouldn’t cut Medicaid, Tillis dared concede, “It is inescapable this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made.”
Tillis insulated Trump from his ire, saying, “I’m telling the president that you have been misinformed. I’m telling the president that you have been misinformed. You [are] supporting the Senate mark [which] will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.” Tillis, at least openly, cannot bring himself to consider the possibility that Trump knows it’s a lie to claim all the bill does to Medicaid is eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Beyond being substantively cruel, the lie is politically stupid, as many Medicaid recipients, as well as SNAP recipients, are Trump voters.
On the opposite edge of the GOP spectrum are the fiscal scolds like Senator Ron Johnson, who believe the bill didn’t cut enough spending. “I can’t accept a one-and-done bill that leaves our deficits in excess of $1.9 trillion as far as the eye can see,” Johnson said in a NewsNation interview last week, “Until we address that or I see a believable strategy to address additional deficit reduction in the future, it’s pretty difficult for me to vote ‘yes’ and accept this as the new normal.”
But the Senate bill is that one-and-done bill. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it produces more debt than the House version, $3.3 trillion over 10 years. ($3.9 trillion if you add in interest payments.) Senate Republicans barely cloaked this reality by having CBO produce a number that didn’t count the cost of extending “current policy”—namely, renewing the tax cuts enacted in Trump’s first term that are due to expire. Using that fuzzy math, the bill saves $500 billion. But that’s like saying your ongoing mortgage payments are “current policy” and therefore need not be included in your future household budgets. You can tell yourself that, but your bank account will disagree.
Opinions differ regarding the potential consequences of historically high post-World War II federal debt levels, and whatever those consequences are, they won’t be felt by households as immediately and acutely as the loss of Medicaid and SNAP coverage will be felt. Many Republicans agree with Johnson that our debt level should be declining. Yet, they continue to support legislation that piles on more debt by cutting taxes far more deeply than cutting spending, and in the process, rewarding high-income households and punishing low-income households. Johnson is one of them. He told NPR that Trump “satisfied my requirement, which was a commitment to a reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending and a process to achieve and maintain it.” A hollower commitment would be impossible to make.
Hawley bluntly diagnosed the problem: “Frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching. If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver for working-class people.” The One Big Beautiful Bill does not meet that standard. You don’t have to take my word for it when there are so many Republican words that make the point. And the fact that so many Republicans can’t bring themselves to sell this regressive monstrosity of a bill is probably why poll after poll shows most Americans already know how ugly it is.
Trump has effectively asked vulnerable Republicans in Congress to walk the political plank. Sometimes such asks are necessary to get things done. Barack Obama asked vulnerable Democrats to take a tough vote to pass the Affordable Care Act, because getting millions of people health care coverage in the long run was more important than clinging to congressional seats in the short run. But Republicans are being pressured to take an enormous political risk for no obvious substantive policy gain. When Hawley asks his party to do some soul searching, finding the soul may be the hardest part.
