Reconciliation has been around a while, so Democrats can’t claim to be surprised by it. It’s accepted (nominally), it’s not a curveball outside normal procedure. But though it is a cudgel, there are rules about what it’s appropriate to impose on Democrats. People who didn’t bother to educate themselves about what reconciliation involves, like Elon Musk, apparently, want to get everything they want all at once. That’s not what reconciliation is for. And the things they want require 60 votes for cloture, unless Republicans want to roll the dice and get rid of the filibuster, which they don’t.

I’d be happy with keeping taxes where they are. The one thing Republicans MUST do is avoid raising taxes, or in this case, allowing them to rise. But ICE funding and taking Medicaid away from illegals is nice, too.

Am I concerned about the national debt? Sure. But this isn’t the bill to even start solving that problem. To scuttle the possible good outcomes based on that subject is the classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

I’ll settle with the good, and the imposition of control upon the Democrats.

BREAKING: The Big Beautiful Bill now allows Medicaid to fund gender-affirming care for minors after the Senate parliamentarian blocked a provision that would have banned it.

@GeneralMCNews

If true I expect some strong pushback in the House.

https://archive.md/hsv4A

All seems pretty reasonable to me.

I say if Musk wants to start a new party, you go, guy! Hey, America is about competition, right? It would liven up politics even more, though it’s quite lively now! However, I don’t think Musk can match the appeal of MAGA. The RINOs need to be challenged and turned out of the GOP, IMO, despite Neo’s thoughtful comments about Susan Collins. [The macro problem is that the electorate is too foolish and corrupted.] I also enjoyed HC68’s comment about grinding out conservative progress a few yards at a time.

This is in the same ballfield as the complaint that some unknown person slipped a paragraph into the bill before the vote.
Also from miguel on an earlier thread:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/megabill-mystery-new-solar-wind-tax-surprise-republican-senators-rcna216120

Why doesn’t the Congress have document controls that prevent this sort of thing?
A vote has to be taken on the bill as it stood at a fixed point in time, when the Senators (or Representatives) thought they knew what it said (does anyone really know?) not what someone changed later.

However, there IS an early precedent.
https://www.quotes.net/mquote/961948

Hancock: Very well. Are there any objections to the declaration being approved as it now stands?

Adams: I have one, Mr. Hancock.

Hancock: You, Mr. Adams?

Adams: Yes. Mr. Jefferson, it so happens that the word is “unalienable,” not “inalienable.”

Jefferson: I’m sorry, Mr. Adams, but “inalienable” is correct.

Adams: I happen to be a Harvard graduate, Mr. Jefferson.

Jefferson: I attended William and Mary, Mr. Adams.

Hancock: Gentlemen, please! Mr. Jefferson, will you yield to Mr. Adams’ request?

Jefferson: No, sir. I will not.

Adams: Oh, very well. I withdraw it.

Franklin: Oh, good for you, John.

Adams: I’ll speak to the printer about it later.

Bonus link to the full script of “1776”
https://msflanaganssite.weebly.com/1776.html

Hey, you need a lotta room to roll all those logs!

https://x.com/AlexEpstein/status/1940089077409489010

There are other aspects like the ‘no tax on tips’ were reduced to some tax on tips

Note the senates priorities the counter productive ‘clean energy’ subsidies stay the peasants must pay a large share

If this bill passes and many discover whats not in it, there will be consequences

So why hasnt thune replaced mcdonough if he wants to make a clean break with mcconnell not too mention ‘cleanface’ reid

https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2025/07/01/trumps-big-beautiful-bill-ends-medicaid-funding-illegal-migrants/

Yes, McConnell did plenty of counter-productive things. But McConnell isn’t in charge any more. Thune isn’t going to please plenty of people, but he’s far better than McConnell, IMHO.

— Neo

Oh, I know, and I agree completely that Thune is a big improvement on McConnell. I’m just saying that we should keep in mind that privately a lot of the GOP Senators, including likely Thune, would rather big parts of the MAGA agenda get dropped. The big donors have a lot of influence, and many Republican office holders were quite literally recruited to run by business groups.

@neo: It’s the old “perfect is the enemy of the good” routine.

Been hearing that for 25 years too. There’s another routine, “doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result, but expecting a different one”.

— Niketas Choniates

We’re not doing the same thing over and over, though. It’s just that it’s a long hard slog. See below.

The more we make excuses, the worse it will get, there is no cavalry coming to save us. After having overcome such odds to get someone like Trump, who can’t do everything himself, and watching the rest of the GOP throw it all away.. when are we going to learn?

…

At some point we need to recognize that what keeps happening is what is intended to happen. That the interests of GOP Senators and Congressmen are not our interests, and that they don’t actually intend to represent us. Their true constituencies are the people who get government money.

Especially concerning illegal aliens, which is an 80-20 issue with the public, just an obvious slam dunk, but what keeps happening?

— Niketas Choniates

What’s happening is that we’re gradually, agonizingly slowly grinding out some progress.

To the question, when are we going to learn, the answer appears to have been somewhere in the second term of Bush the Younger.

Remember that the GOP establishment tried to play all the same old tropes for McCain and Romney (i.e. it’s them or Obama!!!!), but the GOP voters were fed up and didn’t turn out. Obama’s wins were not about his huge popularity, because he never was hugely popular. It was about Dems turning out and Republican voters staying home.

For election after election, the GOP would drive turnout by pointing out that the alternative was worse. Which worked, because it was true. But each time the GOP moved a little more in a worse direction themselves, until by 2008 they couldn’t make that work anymore. Yes, the GOP electorate detested and feared Obama, but not enough to turn out for John Open Borders McCain or Mitt Open Borders Romney.

Romney esp. faced this issue, because as bad as 4 years of Obama had been, it still didn’t make GOP voters any more friendly to the open borders agenda, or the rest of its kin. Plus the voters knew that even if they swallowed hard and voted for Romney, that would mean in 2016 that they would yet again face that same nauseating choice: Romney or a liberal Democrat again.

So they just stayed home.

(And they were right to do so. In late 2013, IIRC there was an article in The Economist in which a reporter as a high-level Romney campaign guy what they would have hoped to have done by then, if they had won the election a year before. His answer was a laundry list of unpopular Chamber of Commerce priorities.)

The TEA Party movement was a rebellion against the GOP as much as the Dems, and McConnell boasted at one point of having ‘crushed’ it. Which simply opened the door for Trump. I can still remember the GOP establishment and commentariat’s confusion and shock when Trump came out of nowhere to dominate the polling and then the voting. Nothing they threw at him worked, because they had no credibility left.

It’s been going on like this since 2008, more or less, the GOP base voters rebelling against and gradually forcing back the donors’ forces. It’s painful and slow and has a lot of setbacks, because the establishment represents the wealthy and the powerful, the ruling class, and it’s fighting for its survival in both its Dem and GOP manifestations. But bit by bit, progress is happening.

The current situation, for all its in adequacies, would have seemed like fantastic progress in 2017. Trump’s halting, mistake-prone accomplishments in his first term were light-years better than Jeb Bush would have been, and of course incomparably better than Hillary. Having Governors like deSantis and Abbott setting the tone would have seemed like miraculous accomplishments in 2017.

In 2017 or 2018, just preventing things like the Trans Pacific Trade agreement seemed like a breath of fresh air. Compare that to today!

In 2017 or 2018, we would have felt as if we were making huge gains simply to close the borders and reduce the inflow seriously, mass deportation was not even politically conceivable.

We saw the ruling class throw mass lawfare against Trump, only to empower him. We’ve replaced the ‘go along to get alongs’, at least in some cases, with people like Bondi and Homan and Bongino. None of them are perfect, but improvements? Oh, yes.

Then there are issues like gun rights, where we’ve made huge progress since the middle 2000s.

Yeah, it’s frustrating and hard and it shouldn’t be. But that’s the reality of the world we live in. We slowly, steadily grind out progress, because our progress is against the self-interest of the current ruling class. The same thing has happened whenever an uprising happens against the current ruling class, whether it was in the time of Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, or today.

There are no short-cuts, unfortunately. Just day after day grinding out successes against the opposition. That’s where things like the perennial bad idea of a Constitutional Convention go wrong. There’s just no way to win this fast and easy. But at least we’re moving in the right direction now, and we’ve actually come a long way since 2008.

Right now, I guarantee you the Dems, and the GOPe, and the ruling class corporate establishment, don’t feel secure, or as if they were winning.