Dear Leader Donald Trump left the gilded White House on Tuesday to head to Capitol Hill, where he tried to strong-arm House Republicans into voting for his "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" by saying that the legislation, which is expected to rip health care and food stamps away from millions of low-income Americans, doesn't cut "anything meaningful."
Trump made the wildly out-of-touch and false comment after he held a closed-door meeting with the sycophantic House Republican conference, which, as of this writing, appears not to have the votes to pass his dog-shit legislation. His visit was an effort to twist arms and get enough of the holdouts onboard to pass the bill.
"We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful," Trump said, referring to the bill that is expected to cause 13.7 million people to lose their health insurance, and put nearly 11 million at risk of losing food assistance. "The only thing we're cutting is waste, fraud, and abuse. With Medicaid—waste, fraud, and abuse. There's tremendous waste, fraud, and abuse. … We have illegal aliens that are multiple killers, with multiple murder records, getting Medicaid."
In fact, the bill creates Medicaid work requirements, which experts say will be extremely costly to enforce and will lead people who are eligible to receive Medicaid benefits to lose their coverage because of bureaucratic red tape. The bill will also let enhanced premium tax credits that help Americans pay for Affordable Care Act plans expire, which would cause more than 4 million people to lose their insurance.
The bill also shifts more of the costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, onto states, which may not have the resources to fund the program at current levels. And it expands work requirements to receive the food aid, which could again cause eligible people to lose their benefits.
After meeting with House Republicans, however, Trump falsely claimed that no one would lose food benefits because food prices “are coming way down.
“The cut is going to give everybody much more food,” Trump said, an idiotic comment that we won’t even try to understand.
Ultimately, House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to ram the legislation through his chamber before Republicans flee Washington, D.C., for the Memorial Day holiday.
As of this writing, Johnson plans to hold a House Rules Committee meeting at 1 AM ET on Wednesday to change the legislation so that it will appease the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, which is demanding deeper Medicaid cuts in order to pay for the bill’s tax cuts.
But it's unclear whether Trump's pep talk to his caucus of sycophants will be enough to get the legislation passed. Warring factions within the House conference are still not pleased, and hard-liners want more spending cuts.
"We all are here to advance the agenda that the president ran on and that we all ran on. … I don't think the bill is exactly where it needs to be yet,” Rep. Chip Roy, a far-right Republican from Texas, said on Fox Business after the meeting with Trump, adding in a post on X, “We need to extend the Trump tax cuts, but we also need to deliver on the spending restraint."
Meanwhile, a group of Republicans from New York and California want changes to the tax code to allow Americans to deduct more of the state and local taxes they pay—which would add to the deficit. Johnson had been negotiating with this group, which calls themselves the “SALT Caucus,” but no deal has been made so far, and Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday morning that the members are still pledging to vote against the bill.
Of course, Republicans almost always cave when Dear Leader demands it, so we are under no pretenses that this reverse-Robin-Hood bill is destined to fail.
But as of this writing, it does not have the votes.
Contact your lawmakers and tell them to vote against a bill that steals from the poor to give to the rich.
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