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.)
Add onto that pile of worry the polling that shows a majority of the American public doesn’t want anything to do with it. Quinnipiac University’s poll, released last week, showed 55% of voters opposing it, with just 29% backing it. Among Republicans, support was a shockingly low 67%. [...]
The megabill extends the first-term Trump tax cuts, rolls back clean-energy programs from the Biden era and beefs up immigration enforcement while increasing the national debt by trillions. The deep cuts to Medicaid and food-stamp programs are expected to hurt voters in spades, and advocates were already worrying that the spill-over effects would endanger everything from rural health centers to food centers for poor Americans to nursing home and home-health services. Congress’ scorekeeper said almost 12 million Americans would lose health care as a result of these cuts. And the spending cuts are mostly in service of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, while leaving those at the other end of the spectrum holding the bag.
There's more at the link.
And you know what’s on my mind at the moment? An old slogan: “No taxation without representation.” That’s certainly where we are now. With our elected representatives falling all over themselves kissing the Trump ring, our interests are not being represented.
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