The Republican claim that their bill’s Medicaid cuts won’t take away people’s health insurance because people will get employer health insurance is either spoken out of dishonesty or ignorance. Many people on Medicaid will not be able to get a full time job that supplies benefits like health insurance. They will be paid little and not receive health insurance. Medicaid expansion has not shown to increase unemployment.
Rather than honestly and straight-forwardly cutting Medicaid, the Republican bill adds thick layers of paperwork and bureaucratic hassles onto a bureaucracy that they purposely underfund and understaff to effectively cut Medicaid, taking away health insurance for many low income people.
“Part of the reasons for the disarray is that while some GOP leaders and committee chairs might have had a good sense of the shape of the bill, many rank-and-file members have not. Tensions have flared as lawmakers have been briefed on key details of the developing legislation — some of which could have profound impacts in their states and districts.”
“only 121 of those 293 B.T. (Before Trump) Republican legislators (41 percent) still have an office on Capitol Hill.
Some of this, of course, is normal attrition. Nineteen of the Republicans who left Congress did so to seek another office, something House members do all the time. Thirty lost a general election, indicating they didn’t want to leave Congress. Some of the 70 who retired from elected office, such as 82-year-old former Rep. Kay Granger, probably did so for age or health reasons rather than political ones. There were even four Republican members of Congress who died in office.
But some undeniably left because they no longer fit in in Trump’s GOP. Most obviously, 10 lost a primary election to a fellow Republican, including former Reps. Liz Cheney, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Tom Rice, who all faced a Trump-backed primary challenger after voting to impeach him in 2021. Several others, like Trump critics former Sen. Jeff Flake and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, likely chose not to run for reelection because they were worried they would meet the same fate. Other departed Republicans, like former Sen. Rob Portman, former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Rep. Ken Buck, expressed frustration with the direction of their party on their way out the door. Two, former Reps. Justin Amash and Paul Mitchell, even left the Republican Party before retiring from Congress.”
Republicans in Congress are not acting like a co-equal branch designed to be a check on power grabs from the president. They are acting like a non-person character, or a non-person Congress.
“The problem for Trump is that for all of his talk of prioritizing loyalty in his second term, he has staffed his administration with a number of conservative ideologues who could have very different ideas about what the government should be doing — none more influential than his likely soon-to-be budget director, Russ Vought.
Vought is a well-known quantity on Capitol Hill from his time as a staffer there, to say nothing of his work as a Project 2025 author and all-around warrior for small government. Republicans there saw his fingerprints on the spending freeze — or the “Vought memo,” as some are calling it.
“This has Russ’s name written all fucking over it,” said one GOP aide who works in appropriations, adding, ”I see a disparity between what Trump wants to do and what Russ wants to do.”
In other words, the battle between fiscal hawks and populists is set to rage not only on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in the coming months, but inside the White House itself.
“There’s an undercurrent of the old Republican Party at play where they’re like, ‘We’re going to cut benefits’ and all this,” the lawmaker said. “And like the new Republican Party is like, ‘Yeah, we don’t care about that.’””
“GOP leaders see an opportunity for a new, working-class coalition, which includes more union outreach. It’s a major shift, and fault lines are already forming over President Trump’s pro-labor Cabinet nominee, former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer.”
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“Hawley has been quietly circulating draft legislation that would prevent employers from stalling union contract negotiations — keeping the process to months, not years, according to a copy obtained by Axios.”
It’s not conservatism. What we call the conservative movement today is not what the conservative movement historically has been in the United States. It’s a species of reactionary politics. The distinction rests in the party’s fundamental attitude towards democracy and democratic institutions.
The old Republican Party, for all of its faults, played by the political rules. It had faith in the idea that elections determine the winner, and that when elections happen, you accept the verdict of the people and you adjust based on that regardless of whether or not you like the policy preferences.
Reactionary parties are different from conservatism. They both share an orientation towards believing that certain ways in which society is arranged — certain setups, institutions, even hierarchies — are good and necessary. There’s value in the way that things are. What differs between the two of them is that conservative parties don’t see potential social change as an indictment of democracy. That is to say, even if a democracy or an election produces an outcome that they don’t like, that threatens to transform wholesale certain elements of the social order, a conservative would not throw out the political order as a consequence of that. Reactionaries are willing to do that.
My view is, at the core of the Trump movement, which I want to distinguish from every Trump supporter because they’re not the same, but the people who have given Donald Trump an iron grip on the Republican Party, that base of hardcore support, are animated primarily by reactionary politics, by a sense that things have gone too far in a socially liberal and culturally liberal, and even in some cases economically liberal direction, and they want things to go back to partially a past that never existed, but also a past that did exist where there was a little bit more order and structure in terms of who was in charge and what the rules were.”
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“Coming into office last time, Trump didn’t have a vendetta against large chunks of the government. He didn’t believe an election had been stolen from him and that needed to be rectified. At the very least, he thinks it is a public blemish that needs to be shown to be false to many people, because if many people believe that he won, then that’s good enough. It doesn’t matter if he actually did. What matters, to put it differently, is Donald Trump’s honor, and the honor of Donald Trump must be avenged at all costs, and the insult of 2020 must be erased from the history books. That’s the kind of thing that he cares about.
The degree and scope of the planning that has gone into this and the willingness to take a hammer to different institutions and the specificity of the plans for doing so is not normal. To name just one example from Project 2025, they want to prosecute the former Pennsylvania secretary of state who presided over the 2020 elections using the [Ku Klux] Klan Act, which was passed to fight the first Klan. It’s basically alleging that by trying to help people fix improperly filed mail-in ballots in 2020, this Pennsylvania secretary of state was rigging the election, trying to undermine everyone else’s fair exercise of their votes in a way akin to the Klan intimidating Black voters in the 1860s by threatening to lynch them.
When I speak to legal experts about this, they’re like, “No credible prosecutor I know would bring such a charge.” It’s a real abuse of power and anti-democratic in many ways because it’s trying to wield federal power to prevent local authorities from administering elections properly and helping people vote. So in order to try to even begin an investigation on this front, let alone actually prosecute, what you need to do is fire the people who would do that kind of job, which would typically be in the Justice Department Civil Rights Division role, so the Election Crimes Unit and the Criminal Division, fire those people who work on these cases, bring in attorneys who are willing to do what you say, even though it’s ludicrous on the basis of a traditional read of the law, and then initiate an investigation, try to get charges spun up, and then get them to a judge like Aileen Cannon, who’s presiding over Trump’s documents case and has clearly shown herself to not really care about what’s going on, but rather just to interpret the law in whatever way is most favorable to Trump.
All of that stuff, and this is just one specific example, illustrates the ways in which doing what Trump and his allies have outlined as part of their revenge campaign requires attacking very fundamental components of American democracy: the building blocks, like the rule of law, like a nonpartisan civil service that treats all citizens equally, like a judiciary that’s designed with interpreting the law as best as it can, rather than delivering policy outlines, you need all of those things in order to act on already offered promises in what is widely understood to be the planning document for the Trump administration.”