‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Is Massively Unpopular

Time -   In the end, Democrats were unable to stop Republicans from getting their tax-cuts-and-spending plan across the finish line on Tuesday. But, in conversations with strategists close to the Democratic leaders, they had a pretty clever consolation spin: this bill is the most hated piece of major legislation since at least 1990, and Republicans have no plan to fix that.

GOP strategists seemed to understand the buzzkilling buzzsaw they were marching toward with a grim sense of inevitability. Even then, there was still no guarantee the House would accept the Senate’s rewrite of their work.

Fiscal conservatives hated the massive spending and budget trickery. Centrists despised the deep cuts to programs for the poor and elderly. Parochial lawmakers did not realize until the eleventh hour that subsidies for wind and solar energy would hit their states hard, plus an industry-killing hidden tax on those clean-energy sectors seemed to come from nowhere, before getting scrapped. And the pragmatists were watching the GOP’s biggest donor, Elon Musk, threaten everyone who voted for it with a primary challenge and throwing his money toward a new third party. (True to form, President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to deport the South African-born American citizen for his disloyalty.)

NPR -  House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford more than three people voting against the package and has said the weather is a factor. Flights were delayed and canceled last night as members of the House tried to make it to the nation’s capital to vote. NPR’s Deirdre Walsh tells Up First that some conservatives threatened to vote no because the Senate bill costs significantly more than the version the House passed in May. The GOP message is that Congress has to pass the bill to avoid a tax hike since the tax cuts passed during Trump’s first term expire at the end of this year. Walsh says that it is a complicated message, as most people won’t see significant changes in their paychecks. 

NPR -  There are 26 million Americans without health insurance right now. That number is expected to go up by a third because of this bill, according to the CBO. The primary way the bill will separate people from their insurance is increased paperwork, says Julie Rovner with KFF Health News. The bill would require people to prove their eligibility every six months instead of once a year. The process would be more than filling out a form; people would need to upload lots of documentation to prove their claims about their income or health status. This can be a difficult task for those who are physically or mentally sick.