Senate Passes Big Beautiful Bill

July 1, 2025 Hunter Wallace Conservatism, Healthcare, Immigration, Politics, Populists, Progressives, Taxes 0

It should be called the Big Beautiful Political Disaster.

Yes, I know we should be celebrating the Republican Senate passing this bill as a win which will fund all kinds of immigration priorities, but it comes at the steep cost of being politically toxic due to making business tax cuts permanent and cutting popular entitlement programs like Medicaid. It is like a birthday cake that tastes delicious on some level, but which is ultimately poisonous.

Politico:

“It was the exact opposite of what nearly everyone on Capitol Hill expected.

Rather than soften its edges, Senate Republicans took the sprawling Republican megabill the House sent them and sharpened it further, making the heart of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda more politically explosive. …

This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP’s chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along. …

To compensate, Finance Committee Republicans significantly dialed back some of Trump’s marquee campaign promises to enact tax relief for tipped wages and overtime work. Many of those senators privately scoffed that the populist tax policies were not particularly pro-growth, as opposed to the write-offs for business equipment and research and development expenses. …”

As usual, the immigration provisions for Trump voters are a small part of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which is otherwise a glorified Omnibus of unpopular tax cuts and entitlement cuts.

CBS News:

“Washington — Republicans plan to slash Medicaid funding to help offset the tax cuts and new spending included in President Trump’s massive domestic policy bill. There are some differences between the approaches taken by Senate and House Republicans, making Medicaid among the most divisive issues lawmakers have had to navigate in recent months. …

About 71 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid, according to the government’s most recent data. According to a Congressional Budget Office report published late Saturday, the changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in the Senate version would result in an increase of nearly 12 million more uninsured people by 2034. 

The House-passed version would leave slightly fewer without health insurance — nearly 11 million — by 2034, mostly due to cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the CBO estimated earlier in June.  

The Senate version makes $930 billion in cuts over a decade to Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, according to the CBO. The House-passed bill includes nearly $800 billion in cuts …”

I think it will end up passing in some form.

I don’t know if the Republican House has the votes to swallow the Senate bill.

I predict the Big Beautiful Disaster will play out like the 2018 midterms when budget reconciliation was used to pass the Trump tax cuts in 2017. From that point forward, the Democrats ran on “tax cuts for the rich” and defined the midterms as being as a referendum on healthcare and won. Democrats are already succeeding in branding the Big Beautiful Disaster as a Medicaid bill, not an immigration bill.

Note: I wish I could say that I am surprised, but Senate Republicans never learn anything from experience. These are the same people who were all over television last week panicking elderly people watching FOX News about Iran being “two weeks away” from nuking New York City.

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