Do you know what’s in the Big Beautiful Bill that just passed the Senate?
I freely admit that I’m struggling to understand exactly what’s in the bill and, more importantly, how it will affect Americans. And I think I’m hardly the only one, if people were to be honest.
The media and the politicians and even bloggers and commenters put their own spin on it. There are, for example, the usual cries against GOP members who are perceived as selling out to various interest groups. There’s the railing against the parliamentarian and those who decided not to overrule her, although they might have. But I don’t fully trust anything I’m reading. So here’s my take on it which admittedly contains a lot of guesswork.
The bill passed 51-50 with Vance breaking a tie, and the three GOP defectors being Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins:
Paul and Tillis had each voted against even debating the bill. Paul called for greater spending cuts. Tillis said the bill would cost his state $26 billion in Medicaid funding, breaking a federal promise of health care to low-income people. …
Collins had voted to debate the bill but opposed its approval primarily because of Medicaid cuts. She said one-third of her state – 400,000 people – depend on Medicaid and the bill would hurt rural healthcare providers and nursing homes.
She also cited concerns about phasing out tax credits for renewable energy providers. She said the bill should have kept incentives for families that choose to install heat pumps and residential solar panels.
I’ve said it before about Collins, and I’ll say it again: if you want Maine to have a Republican senator, it would have to be someone who votes as Collins does. Otherwise, it’s a Democrat for sure and would help Democrats to gain control of the Senate.
Note also there were only three defectors, which made it possible for the bill to pass. That’s because the other would-be defector, Murkowski, was placated in a compromise:
The deal with Murkowski breaks a deadlock that lasted throughout Monday night and into Tuesday morning.
Thune, Crapo and Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) thought they had secured Murkowski’s vote by crafting language to provide an enhanced federal Medicaid match for Alaska and a waiver to shield the state from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts.
But Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough threw a wrench into those plans by ruling the initial Medicaid and SNAP provisions designed to help Alaska didn’t comply with the Byrd Rule and therefore weren’t eligible to pass the Senate with a simple-majority vote.
Republican leadership and committee staff then spent hours Monday and early Tuesday morning to craft language that could secure the approval of both Murkowski and the parliamentarian.
So, why didn’t the Senate GOP just vote to overrule the parliamentarian? I believe – although I also don’t know – that the answer revolves around the three defectors plus Murkowski. I don’t think any of them – and that includes Murkowski – would have voted to overrule the parliamentarian. Certainly there’s no reason that the three who voted against the bill would have voted to overrule the parliamentarian in order to pass it – that simply wouldn’t make sense. And Murkowski was very lukewarm on the bill as well, and relishes her own power.
So those people who are angry at the GOP as a whole for not voting to overrule the parliamentarian are – IMHO – not taking into account the reality, which is that it probably couldn’t have been done. Still another reality is that getting rid of Collins would bring the Democrats closer to a Senate majority; Tillis is going anyway; and Rand Paul is Rand Paul, another kettle of fish.
Furthermore, this isn’t the final bill. It has to be “reconciled” in the House. The fat lady may be warming up in the wings, but that’s about it.
NOTE: If you want to find out what’s in the Senate bill about Medicaid versus what’s in the House bill about Medicaid, here’s the only article I found that purports to say. It’s CBS, so it would tend to have an anti-GOP spin, but take a look.
Rand Paul’s middle name is McCain. Wanting to get everything you want without compromise would mean the Dems would win, and win in 26 and 28
Any 950 page bill is an atrocity.
Here’s Fox analysis of what’s in the bill:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tax-cuts-work-requirements-asylum-fees-heres-whats-inside-senates-version-trumps-bill
I agree completely that we’re unlikely to get a GOP Senator from Maine who isn’t more or less of a RINO in the foreseeable future. So yeah, it’s no use being mad about Collins’ actions, when she’s the best we can do there.
But there is another side to the dynamic that bears noting.
For years, the GOP Senate leadership used Collins and the other RINOs as an excuse, or pretext, to not do stuff that the voters wanted but the Chamber of Commerce hated. They (and McConnell was bad about this) would spend huge efforts to keep the RINO seats, while deliberately losing winnable elections that could put more conservative Senators in and widen margins (and thus take away the excuse of the RINOs).
I still to this day believe that part of Mitch McConnell would have been very happy to lead a 49 seat GOP minority, thus letting him focus on the business agenda while giving lip service to the rest, with no pressue to deliver.
Remember that McConnell led a Senate GOP that held 30-odd meaningless show votes to end Obamacare, then went into a panic of confusion and recrimination when the Donald was elected and said, “Send me the repeal bill!”
The thing was that the Chamber of Commerce loved Obamacare, because it was a chance to offload employee health care costs onto the taxpayers, and it promised to be great for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
So as soon as it mattered, panic.
Our political system is nothing but governing by bribery and fear. When has it really been anything other than that?
yes Mcconnell traded seats in Arizona and Ga to hold Murkowskis seat, well the cheating in strategic precincts helped out, now Gallegos and Warnock, who fills me with dread they don’t really don’t matter in this circumstance, except for the fact they prevent a 55 seat majority, Moreno who took Portman’s seat, if memory serves, there was another pivotal one, that made the caucus redder, McCormick, not a moderate so called like Specter,
I don’t think any of them – and that includes Murkowski – would have voted to overrule the parliamentarian.
They did on May 21.
So those people who are angry at the GOP as a whole for not voting to overrule the parliamentarian are – IMHO – not taking into account the reality, which is that it probably couldn’t have been done.
They just did it on May 21. Somehow, it wasn’t impossible four weeks ago. And now, impossible! What was reality four weeks ago is no longer reality even though it’s all the same people.
Still another reality is that getting rid of Collins would bring the Democrats closer to a Senate majority…
“But the Democrats” increasingly loses its force the longer this goes on. “But the Democrats” has been the excuse since the year 2000. 25 years now. Somehow, the Dems ram stuff through and it sticks forever even when they don’t have 60 votes in the Senate. True, GOP Congresses slow it down a little, but for what? What cavalry is coming to save us if we slow it down a little?
What conservative victory has a GOP Congress gained that is still with us? What progressive victory has a Dem Congress gained that is NOT still with us?
At some point, people who vote Republican have to grapple with holding the GOP accountable. The first 25 years of this century have gone by, is it too much to expect we try it in the next 25?
Think we’re going to keep majorities by keeping illegals in Medicaid? What happened to being on the 80 side of 80-20 issues?
Weren’t we all cheering on DOGE? Hasn’t the GOP just gutted all of that? Are we cheering just for the letter R at this point?
And if you think it’s porky now wait for the House to get their licks in again.
Niketas:
You seem to misunderstand my point.
I did not say that the four people who wouldn’t have voted to overrule the parliamentarian IN THIS CASE would have declined to do so because they’re against overruling the parliamentarian in principle. I thought I made it quite clear that they wouldn’t be motivated to overturn the parliamentarian IN THIS CASE, for a bill they’re not in favor of in the first place (for the three, and Murkowski had to have her arm twisted to approve the BBB because of her Medicaid objections so I strongly doubt she’d vote to overrule the parliamentarian in order to make Medicaid unavailable to illegal aliens). It is case-specific. So of course they might vote to overrule her for other bills.
In addition, if they couldn’t overrule the parliamentarian, they had to compromise or not pass the bill at all, which would have angered even more GOP votes. It’s the old “perfect is the enemy of the good” routine.
miguel cervantes; HC68:
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: 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”.
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?
The votes in Congress are managed. They are horse-traded for. Our leadership did not want to do what it took to buy off the 3-4 they needed this week, but they sure were able to do it 4 weeks ago.
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:
You’ve been hearing it for years, but that is irrelevant in terms of whether it’s true or false, and what it means for the present situation.
I see it as a truth, an indictment of perfectionism that can become destructive to a cause. I see its truth constantly. Your mileage obviously differs.
The rest of the GOP is not throwing it ALL away. That’s a statement that makes no sense. For starters, Trump is in favor of the bill’s passage. It contains plenty of things he’s in favor of and the GOP is, IMHO, being realistic about what’s possible.
Hugh Hewitt just interviewed energy secretary, Chris Wright, about the pro energy items in the BBB. Tremendously exciting. Everything from building pipelines in Alaska to increase funding for new oil refineries. And a lot of other stuff. You can hear the interview on Salem and on other podcast aggregators.
I see Dathan has reappeared to counsel us on how much better it will be when
Pharoahthe Democrats are back in charge. How saddening.Then there’s Elon Musk now saying that if the Big Beautiful Bill passes he will create a nationwide “third” party the very next day. That will, of course, destroy the Republican Party and give Democrats control of everything. Then again, that’s after Trump has threatened to go after any Republican who votes against it. So Republicans are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
In response to Musk’s threat, Trump has again threatened to cancel SpaceX’s contracts with the government. This is after the Space Force has cancelled the non-SpaceX contracts for a satellite constellation to detect and track hypersonic missiles in favor of buying such services from a constellation owned and operated by SpaceX. This switch to SpaceX happened *after* Musk threatened to decommission Dragon while a Crew Dragon was queued up at the Kennedy Space Center ready for launch and after Musk *actually* twice shut down Starlink over parts of Ukraine after getting into a Twitter spat with the Ukrainian foreign minister.
Doesn’t anyone think things through anymore?
It might make for amusing entertainment, but none of this belongs in real life.
— 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.
— 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.
— 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.
On Medicaid, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-MO, says that the bill definitely includes cutting Medicaid for illegal aliens. I dunno.
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2025/07/01/trumps-big-beautiful-bill-ends-medicaid-funding-illegal-migrants/
Heres one thing that isnt in it
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
Someone should remind Elon of the terms Eminent Domain and Just Compensation.
@ Chases Eagles > “Any 950 page bill is an atrocity.”
Hey, you need a lotta room to roll all those logs!
@ Miguel from Alex Epstein’s post: “PS Several Senators have already told me they didn’t know about or understand this last-minute paragraph. If that’s the case they should do whatever they can to fix the situation.”
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
Bonus link to the full script of “1776”
https://msflanaganssite.weebly.com/1776.html
I agree with Musk that the OBBB should be written to cut the deficit. Sen. Ron Johnson (WI) was saying this too, but voted for the bill in the end. My impression is that he is a stand-up guy, and I wonder why he switched.
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.
WSJ lead editorial on the BBB.
https://archive.md/hsv4A
All seems pretty reasonable to me.
I just received this:
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.
At a certain point, it doesn’t matter what’s in the bill, only getting it passed. From the start, the reconciliation bill has been the cudgel by which the Republicans get to impose their will on the Democrats, even though they only have slim majorities in both houses.
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.