A Blunt Look at the BBB Fails
Tough love trigger warning
The thing about warnings is that they are seldom welcomed, and often heeded too late.
The GOP Congress is about to learn that lesson. Having passed a bloated grotesquerie in haste, their repentance will come at leisure as they (and their constituents) find out what is in it.
But there are other lessons and warnings too, including some that are not altogether pleasant. But as you read this, remember that I never promised you a safe space.
Happy Monday.
No, you are not losing your mind. We live in crazy times. If you are trying to stay sane through the chaos, you’ve come to the right place.
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Some BBB Fails
Let’s start with the obvious: Trump got almost everything he wanted — including a lot of stuff he has no clue about — in this bill. He will aggressively sell all the goodies in it — along with massive dollops of disinformation. But it is and will likely remain deeply unpopular. Via G. Elliott Morris:
The list of losers is long, including (but not limited to) low income Americans; Medicaid recipients; the renewable energy industry, migrants, and all of the future generations who will get stuck with the tab for the massive deficits.1 Among the likely losers: the GOP itself, especially the alleged “normies” in swing districts, who mortgaged their electoral future to the MAGA fever dreams in the BBB.
But we also need to look at some hard truths, because this is the worst possible time to drift into denial, get high on hopium, or get locked into a progressive bubble.
The hardest truth: This may have been a loss for the American people, but this was a big Trump win. He continues to plow through the norms, institutions, and guardrails of government, and he will use the BBB to accelerate his momentum.
Acknowledging this is not defeatism: it’s a recognition of the challenge ahead.
We also need to take a clear-eyed look at what just happened, including the many fails that led us to the point. Pre-BBB, we’ve watched the failure of one bulwark after another: the premature capitulation of the billionaires; the surrender of the Big Law firms and corporate media; and the disappearance of legal norms that we had once taken for granted.
And we certainly shouldn’t be numbed to the obvious fails that marked the passage of Trump’s MegaMaga bill: including the bludgeoning of the normal legislative process and the obliteration of transparency.
But let’s take a moment to acknowledge several other crucial Fails:
“Fiscal Conservatives.” The collapse of any meaningful opposition to the tumefied debts and deficits in this bill was an extinction-level event for what was once known as “fiscal conservativism.” Despite an occasional bleat and dead-cat bounce, it is dead as a political movement. To be sure the GOP record is decidedly uneven (and rank with hypocrisy), but last week’s vote showed that GOP fiscal conservativism is a figment that can no longer muster even a handful of votes in the GOP.
“GOP moderates.” Mythical creatures. Prone to flight. When cornered will roll over and wet selves. If they actually existed, they would be an Endangered Species.
Republicans for Ukraine. This was the moment when they had maximum leverage. This is when they could have taken a stand. Days earlier, Trump had abruptly cut off promised aid to Ukraine, even as Vladimir Putin was ramping up his daily missile/drone attacks. Allegedly, there is still a strong contingent of Republicans who do not want to switch sides in the Cold War. They could have demanded that America keep its promise before passing the spending bill. But on the final roll call, they were invisible.
Elon Musk. How much clout does the world’s richest man have in Trump’s party? None. Nada. Zip. The former DOGE master railed against the bill as a travesty and a disaster. He threatened to fund primary challengers; he promised support for dissidents. In the end, only two members of the house GOP voted against it. In other words: Elon’s new political launch had a rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Lisa Murkowski. Just pathetic. After she cast the decisive vote to pass the MegaMagaBill, she offered this bit of disingenuous naivete: “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” Murkowski told reporters. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” But she did not even get a mess of pottage for her surrender. As I wrote the other day:
“And so ends Murkowski’s brief stint cosplaying as a Woman of Principle. And I would argue that makes her even worse than other collaborators and toadies.
“She pretended to be better; and might have been. But it was all bullshit. She could have been a John McCain. Instead, she chose to be a low-rent Lindsey Graham.”
Never Trump. (And, yes, I do own a mirror. Thanks for asking). Nine years ago it was possible to identify a viable, principled remnant in the Trumpified GOP. But, at least among elected Republicans, it is like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch: passed on; ceased to be; expired; gone to meet its maker; stiff, and bereft of life. There are no Mitt Romneys, Jeff Flakes, or John McCains around anymore. No Liz Cheneys or Adam Kinzingers left. In 2025, despite its constituency in the media, the Democratic donor class and independents, Never Trump cannot muster a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. (And, no, I did not enjoy writing this any more than you enjoyed reading it.)
The Democrats. This is why you have to win elections. But even in a closely divided Congress, it’s worth asking why the Democrats were unable to peel off more votes from a bill that is so manifestly unpopular.
The Comment Section Is Now Open For Business:
Nota Bene
Peter Wehner: Why Evangelicals Turned Their Back on PEPFAR
But it’s still hard to ignore this fact: White evangelicals voted in overwhelming numbers to put into office a president who has, for now, decimated a program that qualifies as among the greatest health interventions in the history of medicine and one of the most humanitarian acts in the history of America. Millions may die as a result. And a religious movement that proudly advertises itself as pro-life, and which over the years has taken public stands on issues including abortion, same-sex marriage, pornography, critical race theory, the role of women in combat, school curriculum, and sports betting and gambling in all forms, has, with rare exceptions, said nothing about it.
A pastor of a conservative evangelical church told me he’s grieved by this. “I got exhausted by the sympathetic inaction,” he told me. “If a Democratic administration were doing this—callously, illegally, and completely unnecessarily destroying a cause prayed for, advocated for, designed by, and in many cases carried out by evangelical believers—I struggle to believe that the response would be any less immediate and strident than if they were to mandate states to permit abortion.” He added, “The gleeful destruction of USAID and careless discarding of lives, and the associated lies, are such obvious crossings of red lines, such blatant violations of a basic Christian posture in the world, that acting as though they are politics as usual actively deceives and disempowers our people, and we will have to deal with the cost of inaction as the projections become historical fact.”
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MAGA Congressional Candidate Calls Texas Floods ‘Fake’: It’s ‘Murder’
You can’t make this sh*t up.
Kandiss Taylor, who is running to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives, posted on X Saturday: “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.” Her bizarre post came as authorities searched for dozens of people who lost their lives in Texas’ flash floods. Of the 30 people confirmed dead so far, at least nine were children.
Around 25 campers from a nearby summer camp are still missing.
Taylor later posted her message again: “FAKE WEATHER. REAL DAMAGE.”
Monday dogs
The laying on of feet.
Flashback: Pete didn’t like swimming. But he was up for an occasional sunset cruise in the kayak.
Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers torched the bill:
“These higher interest rates, these cutbacks in subsidies to electricity, these reductions in the availability of housing, the fact that hospitals are going to have to take care of these people and pass on the costs to everybody else and that’s going to mean more inflation, more risk that the Fed has to raise interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation, that’s the risk facing every middle-class family in our country because of this bill.”
Summer asked, “And, for what?”
“A million dollars over 10 years to the top tenth of a percent of our population,” he replied to his own question.
He followed up with a second damning question: “Is that the highest priority use of federal money right now?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is a shameful act by our Congress and by our president that is going to set our country back.”
I think David French wrote something like “someone’s stated identity has nothing to do with their actual values” and the evangelical community is a perfect example. Their revealed preferences are the antithesis of everything they say they stand for.
Calling Lisa Murkowski a “low-rent Lindsey Graham” is giving her far too much credit. She faced a purely Arizona-based choice: Follow in the footsteps of John McCain, or curtsy off into the sunset like Kyrsten Sinema.