Democrats have erupted in a storm of outrage over the passage of Donald Trump’s budget bill, delivering scathing critiques that offered signs of the attack lines the party could wield against Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.
Party leaders released a wave of statements after the sweeping tax and spending Bill’s passage on Thursday.
“Today, Donald Trump and the Republican Party sent a message to America: if you are not a billionaire, we don’t give a damn about you,” said Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chair.
“While the GOP continues to cash their billionaire donors’ checks, their constituents will starve, lose critical medical care, lose their jobs – and yes, some will die as a result of this Bill. Democrats are mobilising and will fight back to make sure everybody knows exactly who is responsible for one of the worst bills in our nation’s history.”
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The Bill’s narrow passage in the House of Representatives on Thursday, with no Democratic support and only two no votes from Republicans – which came from Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania – is “not normal”, wrote congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
While the GOP continues to cash their billionaire donors’ checks, their constituents will starve, lose critical medical care, lose their jobs
— Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chair
Ms Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the contradictions in the Bill that Democrats can be expected to campaign on over the next two years, pitting its spending on immigration enforcement against the loss of social benefits for working-class Americans. She noted that Republicans voted for permanent tax breaks for billionaires while allowing a tax break on tips for people earning less than $25,000 a year to “sunset” in three years.
She also noted that cuts to Medicaid expansion will remove tipped employees from eligibility and remove subsidies for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and reduce Snap food assistance benefits.
“I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did with Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” Ms Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Bluesky. “This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making Ice bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, [the] DEA and others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.”
Many critics referred to choice remarks made by Republicans in the run-up to the Bill’s passage that displayed an indifference to their voters’ concerns.
Senator Mitch McConnell was reported by Punchbowl News to have said to other Republicans in a closed-door meeting last week: “I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it.”
And Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, speaking at a combative town hall in Parkersburg in late May, responded to someone in the audience shouting that people will die without coverage by saying, “People are not ... well, we all are going to die” – a response that drew groans.
Cuts to the Medicaid health programme feature prominently in Democratic reaction to the Bill.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib described the Bill as “disgusting” and “an act of violence against our communities”.
She said: “Republicans should be ashamed for saying, ‘Just get over it’ because ‘We’re all going to die’. They are responsible for the 50,000 people who will die unnecessarily every year because of this deadly budget.”
Budget hawks on the left and the right have taken issue with the effects the Bill will have on the already considerable national debt.
“In a massive fiscal capitulation, Congress has passed the single most expensive, dishonest, and reckless budget reconciliation bill ever – and, it comes amidst an already alarming fiscal situation,” wrote Maya MacGuineas, the president of the oversight organisation Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
“Never before has a piece of legislation been jammed through with such disregard for our fiscal outlook, the budget process, and the impact it will have on the wellbeing of the country and future generations.” – Guardian
