June 9, 2025
At 10:19 last night, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media: “Stand with ICE. Pass the B[ig] B[eautiful] B[ill].”
And there it is. The Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is the MAGA regime’s attempt to replace the American government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the antidemocratic values of Project 2025. The measure is unpopular. According to a new CBS News/YouGov poll, 60% of Americans think the bill will help wealthy people, while 54% think it will hurt poor people. Forty-seven percent think it will hurt the middle class, while only 31% think it will help the middle class. As Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles noted, it’s “[s]tunning how badly Trump and the Rs have lost the debate on what their reconciliation bill will do.”
The measure changes the nature of the American government by extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and adding significantly more money to immigration enforcement and defense spending. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the measure will add as much as $2.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years; with interest costs of that new debt, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded the measure would increase the debt by nearly $3 trillion.
At the same time that it moves money upward and into the white nationalist project of expelling immigrants, the measure guts federal policies and agencies that serve the American people, apparently with the goal of pushing such policies and agencies to the states. The CBO estimates that as many as 13.7 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage if the measure passes, and cuts of nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will mean cuts of about 30% to the programs on which millions of Americans depend.
Miller’s post underscores the administration’s need to change the conversation around the measure, whose 1,000-plus pages lay out the MAGA vision for the United States. “Don’t kid yourself,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) posted. “[T]hey know they are absolutely getting cooked politically w[ith] their terrible bill and rising prices, and they want to create a violent spectacle to feed their content machine. It’s time for the mainstream media to describe this authoritarian madness accurately.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-9-2025