(2025-06-28) Richardson June282025

Heather Cox Richardson: June 28, 2025. Last night just before midnight, Republicans released their new version of the omnibus budget reconciliation bill. It is a sign of just how unpopular this bill is that they released the new version just before midnight on a Friday night, a time that is the graveyard of news stories. ("Big Beautiful Bill")

Democratic challenges and the Senate parliamentarian convinced Republican senators to remove policy provisions from the bill that either were especially incendiary or did not meet the rules for budget reconciliation bills.

Despite these changes, the final measure retains its original structure. That structure tells us a lot about the world today’s Republican lawmakers envision.

The centerpiece of the bill remains its extension of the 2017 tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, making those tax cuts permanent. The tax structure in the measure funnels wealth from the poorest Americans to the top 1%.

According to Alyssa Fowers and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post, the Senate slashed the apparent cost of the bill by using a new method to calculate the numbers. Under the traditional way of estimating the cost of a bill, the new measure would add $4.2 trillion to the national debt. But using the gimmick of ignoring the tax extensions by saying they are simply a continuation of policies already in place, the Senate claims the bill will cost $442 billion, just a tenth of what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculates.

According to immigration scholar Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the measure also provides an additional $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain migrants, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion.

To offset some of the tax cuts in the measure, the Senate bill cuts $930 billion out of Medicaid—more than the House bill cut—and, according to Ron Wyden (D-OR), makes additional cuts to Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the measure will cause 11.8 million Americans to become uninsured

As the Republican attempt to hide the budget reconciliation bill suggests, it is enormously unpopular.

In 1890, the Republicans forced through Congress a similarly unpopular measure: the McKinley Tariff, the law President Donald Trump has spoken of as a model for his economic policies. Like today’s budget reconciliation bill, the McKinley Tariff skewed the country’s economy even more strongly toward the very wealthy, putting more money in the pockets of the richest Americans at the expense of the poorest. (Gilded Age)

More than creating a bad midterm for Republicans, though, the fight over the McKinley Tariff hammered home to ordinary Americans that the system was rigged against them. The fight over the McKinley Tariff gave opponents proof that Congress was working for the rich. In the Alliance Summer of 1890, newspapers sprang up and speakers crisscrossed the plains reminding voters that the government was supposed to treat all interests equally. The famous farmers’ orator Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences that “Wall Street owns the country…. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” She told farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.”

By 1902, President Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was leading the demand for fair government. He called for a “square deal” for everyone.