The GOP Bill Passed the Senate, Proving Republicans Just Don’t Care About the American People

The absolute capitulation of the Republican party to the politics of bully and bluff, to the magical thinking of a mad king and his private universe of faceless drones, to its own worst impulses, to its own dark mythologies, and to the end of the road on which Ronald Reagan put its feet in January 1981. The prion disease has reached its terminal stage—if not for the party then for the country it now seems to have overpowered. What the mad king wants, the mad king gets. From The Washington Post:

The Senate on Tuesday narrowly approved massive tax and immigration legislation that Republicans hope will become the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s second term, dramatically reorienting the role of the federal government and unwinding many of the Biden administration’s accomplishments. ... To offset the cost, the legislation would cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income individuals and people with disabilities, and other health care programs. It would also cut SNAP, the anti-hunger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Nearly 12 million people will lose health care coverage if the bill becomes law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Well, that accounts for the fact that this bill became vastly unpopular at a speed unseen in the Capitol since the passage of the Embargo Act in 1807. (On CNN, pollster Harry Enten was driven to quote former CNN colleague Charles Barkley.) Those numbers don’t matter, though, because of the long list of things that Republicans don’t really care about. To wit:

1. The deficit.
2. Their voters.
3. The water their voters drink.
4. The air their voters breathe.
5. Whether their voters go broke.
6. Whether their voters can send the kids to college.
7. Whether their voters get swindled on credit cards, reverse mortgages, or other sharp practices.
8. Whether their voters have jobs.
9. Whether their voters get sick.
10. Whether their voters live or die.

For the moment, Senator Lisa Murkowski wins the House Cup in the I Got Mine, Jack competition. According to reports, Senate leadership kept tossing goodies into Murkowski’s lap until she finally went into the water, as the old boxing guys used to say. She got hers, and fuck everybody else. From Politico:

But Murkowski touted changes she secured to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that would allow for “greater flexibility” for Alaska and extra support for rural hospitals “that is going to be very key.” Senate Republicans also removed a controversial tax on solar and wind energy projects—a change Murkowski had pushed for. She also said she wanted to see President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts extended.

Ultimately, she’s a Republican whose primary economic philosophy is to shove as much of the nation’s wealth upward. And, of course, having sold out hungry children in Louisiana, sick children in Oklahoma, and elderly nursing-home patients and their families in Vermont, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Colorado, Oregon, and 45 other states, Murkowski now is looking for someone—anyone—to bail her out.

“I had to look on balance, because the people in my state are the ones that I put first,” Murkowski said. “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet."

She’s relying on the House of Flying Monkeys to save her from a retirement to political infamy? Yeah, good luck with that. The House is going to act out of pure jealousy that the Senate found ways to make struggling people more miserable than the House did. Easing Lisa Murkowski’s peace of mind is pretty damn far from the mind of, say, Andy Ogles, or of Thomas Massie, or of Speaker Moses, for all that.

As for the Democrats, well, I suspect that they haven’t the faintest damn clue how to turn the draconian consequences of this awful bill into an effective political backlash. The top echelon of Democratic congressional leadership is spending its time in hysterics about the party’s nominee for mayor of New York. (And, by the way, it’s really time for Kirsten Gillibrand to shut the hell up about everything.)

I have an ominous feeling that by, say, October 2026, the real effects of the Big Plug Ugly will have set in, and the Democrats will be blamed for all of it. They need to strike, now, and hard, and they need to be relentless. And they need to act as though nothing is more important than the political destruction of the current iteration of the Republican party, because nothing is. They have to find a way to make Republican voters own up to their own complicity in the policies that are hurting them, and they have to be merciless about doing that. No more romancing the people who elected the people who just threw them off Medicaid. No more efforts to understand them and why they do what they do. Smashmouth political education, day after day after day. Make Lisa Murkowski remember this as the worst day of her career.