Quickly on the big bill:
– they released updated (not final) text overnight
– it got worse in many places (energy tax credits specifically) and the nods to moderates are token at best
– Paul, Johnson, and Tillis are confirmed no to move forward today
– Thune can't lose another vote— David Dayen (@ddayen.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Nothing like spending a summer weekend watching the world’s worst semi-human beings debate the parameters of a bill that seems to have been named after the sprawling monster that comes for greedy children in a third-rate children’s book…
Thune is not very good at this. There's no way McConnell would have let this thing come out without 50 +1.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 11:56 AM
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I truly think it’s reprehensible that elected Republicans are calling the largest Medicaid cuts in history by far “protecting Medicaid.”
This bill would kick more than ten million people off Medicaid. It isn’t strengthening the program – it’s denying access for millions.— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 9:47 AM
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Right now, no one knows:
-how large the Medicaid cuts are
-how many people will lose health insurance
-how large the tax cuts are
-who wins/loses by how much
-how much it adds to the deficit
Rs are going at lightning speed BECAUSE they want to pass the “big beautiful bill” before anyone knows— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 1:10 PM
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TPM’s live feed: “Senate GOP Keeps Medicaid Cuts, Delays Implementation in Revised ‘Big Beautiful’ Bill”:
The wildly unpopular “Big Beautiful” reconciliation package has encountered possibly existential challenges, though Senate Republicans still hope to bring it to the floor this weekend.
Senate Republicans rewrote key provisions of it after Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected many of Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts, forcing their hand. Senate Budget Committee released the updated legislative text, with changes to the Medicaid and clean energy portions, shortly before midnight on Friday. The new text keeps the controversial cut to the provider tax, pushing back the implementation up to 2028.
It is unclear if the changes will get Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to a favorable whip count this weekend to pass Trump’s megabill.
Several senators are still worried about the bill’s deep Medicaid cuts, specifically the proposal that would curtail provider taxes. Others continue to push back against the bill for not going far enough, claiming it does not cut nearly enough in spending…
I mean, what is funny about all this if we take a step back is how large a repudiation of everything going on is of Elon and what he was trying to accomplish.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 1:42 PM
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Elon, Johnson, Trump, et. al: "THIS IS WHEN WE'RE GOING TO GET THE HOUSE IN ORDER. REDUCE THE SIZE AND SCOPE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, DRAMATICALLY CUT SPENDING."
~*fast forward 5 months*~: Listen if you squint at the numbers right it prints money and we're not spending 4 trillion, bing bong— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 1:44 PM
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Fakest guy on the planet.
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 1:56 PM
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Mike Johnson would hate for the public to know anything.
Republicans rely on clueless constituents.— Being Liberal ®🗽🇺🇲🇨🇦🇲🇽🇪🇺🇺🇳🇺🇦🏳️🌈 (@beingliberal.bsky.social) June 26, 2025 at 8:20 PM
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🚨🚨BREAKING: Susan Collins is concerned.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) June 24, 2025 at 3:20 PM
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No one ever loss money voting on Susan Collins to wimp out. What are the odds?
— David Corn (@davidcorn.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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I will admit that it's kind of funny watching the GOP insist this bill is going to save their electoral prospects in the midterms when like 20% of the country actually likes it and it's even not in great shape with their own party.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 28, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Anonymous at Work
Murkoswski is the swing then, if the other three No’s are for real.
And remember when McConnell whipped the Obamacare repeal as 50+1*??? The * was McCain changing his mind after Senatress Collins had voted No.
trollhattan
Newsom post is a good one, especially because Pastor Mike doesn’t think anybody is looking. Here’s the sit on the home front.
3.4 million is more people than a lot of states’ entire population.
UncleEbeneezer
Well at least we made sure Old Joe Biden isn’t there to veto it…
tobie
I’m really down. I don’t know what I can do.
zhena gogolia
@tobie: Stop reading BJ? At least for a while.
PsiFighter37
I’m not convinced the Senate GOP has any actual spines to vote this down. Nobody in the GOP caucus has a visceral hatred of Trump now like John McCain did.
My belief – this will be a 51-49 vote, with Murkowski and Collins the only nos. And I hope all the poor white people in flyover country enjoy dying faster.
laura
Protecting Medicaid from the people who need it is a hell of a take.
trollhattan
CACO doesn’t have the immediacy of TACO. Plus not available in corn or wheat.
Baud
@PsiFighter37:
They’ll close their eyes and think of black Democrats in the South getting hit worse.
Lyrebird
@tobie: I don’t know what works best for you, but I THANK YOU for providing measured, fact-based comments even on heated topics. You make a difference for me, some random other commenter, at least!
Which is not to go against taking a break here!
This NHK (UK) website has some well-researched info on it FWIW YMMV etc etc.
Baud
Baud
zhena gogolia
OT, repeating from below: Lalo Schifrin, RIP. Had no idea he was alive.
p.a.
@schnorkles.bsky.social
THIS is why I think they will try to bork the election. Martial law, nationalizing N Guard in blue states especially, whatever Calvinball they think up and the SUCOUS rubber stamps. I will not rule out false flag terrorism. The Germany 1930s playbook is operational.
trollhattan
@p.a.: They could give the Postal Service the months before and after the election, off.
Bex
Since this is an open thread I’m going to post it. Don’t worry about the maga cult thing. It was posted by Maga Cult Slayer on Tick Tok. https://x.com/MAGACult2/status/1938821087770403315
Jeffro
every voter in every other country in the world: “so let me get this straight, your elected officials are getting ready to vote to take away what little health care/safety net your country provides? for real??!?”
Another Scott
@Bex: Well done.
Thanks.
Slava Ukraini!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Anonymous At Work
@PsiFighter37: 51-49 but Suzy will vote YEA if Paul votes NAY. No way they let this go 51-50.
brendancalling
@Baud: Cole has this right. The GOP goal is tax cuts and gutting social programs. I don’t know why anyone buys into “but then they’ll be voted out!!1!” First of all, often they aren’t. Second of all, from the GOP’s point of view, who cares if individual soldier ants get stomped. The programs are gutted and the wealthy get their tax cuts.
Soldiers are sent to war to win the war, even if that means many of them die in the process. “They’ll lose their seat” is less of an incentive, especially with well-paid lobbying jobs to break the fall.
Baud
@brendancalling:
Yep. People can’t stay mad at the GOP for very long.
trollhattan
@brendancalling:
Once broken/destroyed social programs, going back to FDR, won’t be reconstituted because forced from office Republicans will have left behind enough impediments to prevent that. Like how Cambodia and Vietnam are still clearing minefields in 2025.
cmorenc
Tillis a no? There have been lots of ads in the NC mass-media market specifically targeting Tillis, most with the common theme of depicting specific NC constituents who would be severely harmed by the budget cuts, appealing to Tillis to vot “no”. Probably reinforced by the phone calls his offices are receiving from NC constituents. Tillis is nervously looking over his shoulder at a tough re-election campaign in 2026.
Y’all can figure out what the lesson for us is from this, esp if Tillis sticks to “no”, but that is still TBD.
Parfigliano
@PsiFighter37: I will enjoy them dieing faster
cmorenc
If Paul, Johnson and Tillis are no, where them is Murkowski? And will the furrowed eyebrow of concern, Collins summon the mojo to actually vote no?
Jackie
Apparently Mike Lee – Utah – snuck selling millions of acres of public lands AGAIN.
Anonymous At Work
@cmorenc: I won’t give ANY odds but would be inclined to give you favorable odds that she’s either a superfluous “NO” in 51-49 or a “I am SOOO concerned” YEA in 51-49. Last time, the plan was have her be the last NAY, in 2017 until McCain decided to “maverick” for the TV interviews and bitch-slap Trump.
dmsilev
@cmorenc: Collins furrowed her brow and then said she’s voting yes on cloture but is ‘undecided’ on the actual bill.
zhena gogolia
@Parfigliano: A lot of Democrats will also die.
Chetan Murthy
@zhena gogolia: If our Republic is to be saved, enormous harm must be visited upon MAGA voters, and at the hands of Trump, visibly and indisputably at his hands. Even then the Republic may be done for, but that’s the only way. That harm will also befall Dem voters, is almost irrelevant: we don’t count in this struggle, b/c it’s doubtful that Dem voters who are harmed will move -towards- Trump because of being harmed.
It is what it is.
Baud
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: I don’t read Rubin’s substack, but a quick perusal of her posts would seem to indicate she is -not- supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran. Which …. color me (happily) surprised. I figured she’d still be a bit of a neocon on this.
Captain C
@Baud: cf. Davis X Machina’s cogent observation.
Chetan Murthy
@Captain C: “He hates the same people I hate; gimme the goddamn ballot paper”
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
I think she’s basically gone full Cole. Unlike some of the other famous Never Trumpers.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: Yes, haha, unlike Bill Kristol. Though hey, we can always hold out hope for him.
jonas
As always, the Republican calculus is “we’re about to screw over a bunch of poor, marginalized people so Jeff Bezos can gift Lauren a second helipad on their yacht for their anniversary next year. Will any of them know who to blame if they do lose their insurance and other benefits, or will they just gut it out and eventually forget what happened?” It seems that once again, they’re going with the old standby: “they won’t know who to blame and some of the usual culture war bullshit, chaff, and misdirection will take care of any who do start whining.”
We’ll see how that goes for them. Either they’re right and it proves that poor people really can be screwed over ad infinitum with no consequences, or things go pear shaped and as it becomes clearer that Republicans are in for an electoral bloodbath next year, we start seeing more LA-style provocations, emergency declarations, talk of the Insurrection Act, martial law, etc., and the electoral blowback problem goes away.
Scott S.
@Baud: +1
Baud
I had the same thought recently.
Anonymous At Work
@Chetan Murthy: I think a lot of neocons are hoping beyond hope that American bombs lead to a “young people” uprising in Iran that ushers in an unregulated capitalist democracy. I think former neocons can only see that such an uprising has to be organic and distanced from US/Israeli efforts in order to a) happen and b) succeed.
Chetan Murthy
@jonas: I have to agree with you, that these sorts of cuts aren’t going to penetrate the all-bone craniums of MAGA voters. My belief is the only thing that might get thru is a bona fide Great Depression Redux (on Trump’s watch, with him holding the trifecta), complete with rampant unemployment, white homelessness, etc. The real thing. Nothing less will get thru.
Chetan Murthy
Delusional.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: They act as if this election were Reagan in 1980. It wasn’t.
Baud
Click through for chart. Medicaid and student loans are the bulk of the pay fors.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: There was a point where I started seeing articles in the UK talking about student loan repayments as a form of taxation: as another way in which the poor pay more tax than the wealthy. Which is precisely what it is.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
It’s what they want it to be.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Voluntarily assumed loans aren’t taxation.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: The argument (which I find convincing) is that students -must- take these loans, in order to get an education. Higher education is necessary for a decent life in our society, and in that sense it is anything but voluntary.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Most people don’t go to college.
I value higher education and would like to deal with the high cost of it, but misclassifying loans as taxes is false. Maybe it’s useful to frame it as something conservatives hate, but it’s still false.
trollhattan
Serious Hungarian FU to Orban today. Nice to see.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c23g02dl1z8o
opiejeanne
@Chetan Murthy: There are very good junior colleges and state colleges in most states.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: What -ought- to happen, is:
(1) higher ed should be free
and (2) it should be paid-for out of increased taxes on the wealthy and high earners
Or as they say, “the means testing is thru progressive taxation”
Instead what we have today is a system that is biased towards the reproduction of well-off elites. I mean, I’m a product of that sytem: my (Indian) great-grandfather was a UChicago engineer, my (Indian) grandfather was a UEdinburgh doc, my father was an India-educated doctor, my siblings and I all went to Bryn Mawr and Rice. My niblings will all go to good schools: we’ll ensure it. That’s elite reproduction. It’s also fundamentally undemocratic.
Chetan Murthy
@opiejeanne: And the price of state schools is also going up and up.
cain
@Chetan Murthy:
Yep.. they need to be the one doing the rioting. Once the feds start attacking them (and calling them liberals) it will start the utter decline of the party.
Every one of these people think they can hold on to power forever but they can’t and once the economy spirals it’s going to be hell.
trollhattan
@opiejeanne: Two years free in California CCs to new HS grads, and guaranteed acceptance to CSU and UC after.
You can finagle a good, reasonably affordable four-year degree using that path.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Republicans have convinced a lot of people to oppose the idea of college. Biden’s student loan forgiveness actions were a net political loser.
scav
Today’s GOP: Strengthening America the way they strengthen Medicaid.
Baud
@trollhattan:
A lot of even red states have made state college free for the less well off.
Another Scott
TheHill (no link) says that Sen. Schumer is going to force a reading of the full Senate bill if/when it passes the Motion to Proceed stage. It’s estimated to take at least 12 hours to do that. Thereby delaying the vote on final passage.
The GQPers who constantly scream about not having time to read these bills before voting on them are profusely thanking him. Right? Right??!
Best wishes,
Scott.
WTFGhost
@tobie: If there’s nothing else you can think of, to do, try to make other people happy. Every decent person in this country has plenty of reason to be unhappy, and spreading happiness will help soften the bruising, so people don’t get as overwhelmed, and, when they do get overwhelmed, it will help them bounce back quicker.
That means breaking out of political space in some way or another. It might not mean going away from politics entirely, though.
What if, instead of worrying, you wrote a song, or poem, or a vignette of life, about how you see things going. What if you wrote a vicious satire where the Great Orange Piggie demanded (extremely graphic and heterosexist example deleted), from supplicants, or from Vance (“Just close your eyes and think of davenports, bitch!”), so Vance was literally hamstringing people – cutting their thigh muscle so they couldn’t escape – so as to never have to do *that* again?
Well, if you did that, you would probably be me, and you’d really have some worries.
Take what’s crushing you, okay, and find a way to manage your emotions, and let them out through art. That’s a way to spread happiness, but be careful, some people find, uh, *certain types* of that happiness better kept in lead lined barrels, under lots of water.
That’s also the basis of art therapy. Remember: it doesn’t have to be *good* art, if it speaks to you.
Okay, but: maybe you do need a break. Stop politics and do something else, but, try to spread happiness through it. Try to get deeply into the latest book club reading, and come up with a few zingers, and devils advocate points for discussion.
Or bring your best cookies. Or, otherwise try to be the crystal from which happiness can grow.
Nothing you do that spreads happiness is going to cause much in the way of harm, and there’s a lot you could do to help, even if it’s only getting someone to laugh who hasn’t laughed in too long.
NotMax
@Another Scott
GOP: “TL:DR. I vote yea.”
stinger
@Baud:
Jen Rubin: “Susan Collins could stop this she won’t. Along with her votes on justices who took away Roe she has arguably done more to harm America than any single senator.”
For that honor, Mitch McConnell gets my vote.
zhena gogolia
@WTFGhost:
This has been my survival mechanism.
Another Scott
@zhena gogolia: Good.
Too many people seem to act as if their purpose is to be a bad example for others.
E.g..
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Bex
@Another Scott: Heroiam slava!
Gvg
@opiejeanne: which require student loans.
I don’t think taxation is a good way to think of it, but don’t underestimate how much it costs and how little the resources are besides loans. There is Pell and then loans, and Pell doesn’t meet the tuition for most state schools in most states, let alone books and rent and food. Jobs are complicated, most students work but there are issues and making enough and making good grades is hard. So they need loans. Forget fancy private schools, I am talking basic state schools. Of which there also aren’t enough because states aren’t funding them.
opiejeanne
@Chetan Murthy: Still cheaper than the private colleges, and in California both the UC and Cal State Universities are considered excellent schools and the JC system is very affordable.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: Yes! We knew a lot of kids who did that, and I took courses at the JC for several years after I had my degree because there were other things I was interested in.
opiejeanne
@Gvg: Not for JCs.
I know it’s tough to work your way through college these days, damned near impossible without a nearly full ride somewhere.
Gwangung
@opiejeanne: That’s what my soon to be former employer explicitly says…and they’re astate run four year university.