Big Beautiful Bill Keeps Falling Apart, Will Pass Anyway

White-knuckle time for John Thune. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The creaking legislative machine congressional Republicans are using to enact Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is getting really noisy and inefficient as it clanks toward a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The math doesn’t really add up anymore. There’s a host of provisions, growing each day, that various Republicans swear they cannot support (Democrats are entirely irrelevant to the process). Yet everyone assumes that when push comes to shove nearly all of these disgruntled customers will buy the final product, lest Trump suffer a debilitating defeat on virtually his entire domestic legislative agenda. That is, indeed, the whole idea of cramming everything the administration wants into a single vehicle that Democrats cannot filibuster in the Senate. A whole year’s worth of Republican legislation with all sorts of nasty little provisions that no one has even noticed will be voted upon in a near-party-line vote, first in the Senate (which has been working from an earlier House-passed version of the bill) and then in the House.

I’ve compared the current dynamic to a game of musical chairs in which Republicans jostle and elbow each other for position, with much yelling and screaming and threats, awaiting the moment when Trump stops the music and his megabill assumes its final shape. It’s always theoretically possible that enough of them won’t fall into line when told to due to some fatal miscalculation by the vote-counters working for Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who only have a few votes they can afford to lose. But we’ve heard the yelling and screaming and threats from Republicans at every stage of this process, and somehow the megabill keeps advancing.

But the problems with this monstrosity of a bill sure are proliferating as the magic moment approaches in the Senate (which is all that matters, since there is no time for a House-Senate conference to iron out differences). The American Prospect’s David Dayen has a quick but accurate status report:

The desperation from the Republican leadership on the Big Beautiful Bill would be funny if I thought it would stick. The bill is clearly not ready for the Senate floor, with numerous Republicans saying they would not vote to advance it. Yet Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is sticking to his original plan of passing the bill this week, a bill that remains invisible, without final text, without CBO scores (which are critical for compliance with budget rules), without fixes to some of the items ruled not germane to a reconciliation bill, and without adjudication on many of the other items, including most of the all-important Senate Finance Committee language that covers taxes and Medicaid.

Yes, the day before Thune says the Senate will begin floor consideration of the megabill, its text is still being reviewed by the Senate parliamentarian for compliance with the Congressional Budget Act’s arcane rules for what can go into a budget-reconciliation bill. Indeed, Senate Republicans have reacted to some earlier adverse decisions by the parliamentarian (notably the way it imposes federal SNAP cuts on states) by tweaking the language, but those tweaks have to be reviewed as well.

So tons of provisions are in flux, each of them affecting the overall fiscal implications of the bill. The problems with the legislation generally fall into three categories:

On this final issue, there is a giant Senate parliamentarian ruling still pending on the Senate’s “current policy baseline” for “scoring” tax cuts. If the parliamentarian doesn’t buy the scam of pretending that extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts won’t affect budget deficits, then there’s suddenly a hole in the bill of more than $3 trillion. That would mean either smaller tax cuts, larger spending cuts, an acknowledgement that the megabill is very fiscally irresponsible, or a new batch about its cost.

Even as they await this big ruling and plot their reaction, congressional Republicans are also struggling to cope with the parliamentarian’s latest edicts on Medicaid, which as Axios reported, are another big problem:

The Senate parliamentarian ruled out the Medicaid provider tax provision in the “one big, beautiful bill,” according to Senate Democrats. 

This complicates the GOP’s math on the spending cuts it needs to pass the package, as well as threatens the careful negotiations between the party’s factions on reaching a final deal.

For Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), it removes a thorny political problem for Republicans, with a handful of GOP members deeply opposed to the provisions.But it will also force the Senate to find additional spending cuts to pay for the tax cuts that are the centerpiece of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill…. The parliamentarian also struck down provisions meant to block the use of Medicaid funds for gender-affirming care and to prevent unauthorized immigrants from receiving Medicaid or CHIP coverage.

No matter where they come down on specific Medicaid cuts (the provider tax language would gut an extremely popular state Medicaid-financing mechanism, of particular importance to rural hospitals around the country), it’s a matter of degrees. Democrats will still be able to argue that the megabill essentially cuts safety-net programs in order to enact tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the wealthy and corporations while funding Stephen Miller’s mass-deportation regime.

As for Republicans, around and around they go, and where they will stop, nobody knows — except perhaps for Donald Trump. It’s possible the July 4 deadline for getting this messy abomination across the finish line will slip, but not far. So it’s time for the final deal-cutting, screaming, threats, and finally, surrender.