Making a Bad Thing Worse

The Senate is working feverishly to come to an agreement on the “Big Beautiful Bill,” AKA the BUTTS or “Big Ugly Trump Tax Shift” Act. It’s one of those things where even the people you’re hoping will kill the bill are doing it for the wrong reasons. (Like, it doesn’t cause enough pain, er, I mean, doesn’t reduce government spending enough.)

They’re under pressure from Lord Fuckface to get this thing wrapped up by July 4^th, so it’s crunch time and pieces are rapidly moving around the board.

They’ve made further cuts to renewable energy subsidies, just to show Elon their butts and the kiss those of the fossil fuel industry, who has owned the Republicans for decades. This makes it clear that Republicans want nothing to do with renewable energy until we’ve dried up every source of oil on the planet, which should give Big Oil enough time to figure out how to make a criminal profit from solar and wind.

They’re also looking for 18% cuts to Medicaid and 20% cuts to SNAP. That demonstrates, in the clearest way, what Republicans are all about… Taking money from the poorest and most desperate to make way for cutting taxes to the richest people in America. That’s it. Government for the rich, by the rich. All along, conservative talk about reducing government spending and lowering the deficit is really about not spending money on lowly citizens who aren’t sending 6-figure checks to their favorite PAC bundler.

George Carlin had it right decades ago when he broke down our society this way: “The Rich do none of the work, pay none of the taxes. The Middle Class does all of the work and pays all of the taxes. The Poor are there… just to scare the hell out of the Middle Class.”

Republicans have a 3-vote majority, but there happen to be three Senators balking at signing on. To illustrate the influence of oily politics, they slipped in an amendment exempting Alaska from the Medicaid cuts, which is Lisa Murkowski’s home state. Then the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that such action would nullify the “Reconciliation Process” they’re using to pass the bill. (Which nixes filibusters and allows passage on a simple majority vote.) That would usually sound like a victory, but the Republicans have shown that they don’t take Parliamentarian findings as anything but recommendations. I’ll bet that when the chips are down, they’ll ignore that particular ruling, like they always do when tradition stands in the front of the gravy train.

Unless they somehow get backed into needing Democratic votes, the bill still contains all that icky stuff that paves the way for our unbalanced president to preside until that last well-done filet does him in. It does everything to install an autocracy, but dub him King Midas the Second.

I’m out here hoping for a miracle but expecting the worst. When you have a group of people with unlimited money, no shame, and no more checks on their power, you know they will never stop themselves.