Senate Passes Budget Reconciliation Disaster 50-50 with Vice President Casting Deciding Vote. Boooooooooo!
Poor and working class people will lose health care + food assistance funds. Solar and wind are getting slashed. Rural economies are going to suffer. But, hey, the rich get their trillion $ tax cuts.
Yeah. You know the drill. Republicans “are really concerned” about things like Medicaid, food assistance cuts, clean energy, rural hospitals, rural economic development, and more. Then they go ahead and pass their party’s pro-rich, pro-wealthy, pro-billionaire Trump agenda. It’s no surprise. There is no honest debate and no backbone in the current Congress.
The Senate passed the Trump One Big Beautiful Bill Act 50-50 just now. Vice President JD Vance had to cast the deciding vote. Republican Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Susan Collins (R-ME) joined all Democrats in opposing the budget deal.
A couple of hundred billion in cuts to food stamps here. Nearly a trillion in cuts to Medicaid there. A $5 trillion debt ceiling as a sweetener. And around $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that disproportionately help out the richest 1% of Americans.
This is one of the absolute worst bills that has passed the U.S. Congress in a century.
Now the reconciliation package heads to the House of Representatives where they will either approve the Senate version or make additional changes leading to a conference committee where negotiators from each chamber will hammer out differences. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been calling for a likely “final vote” Wednesday.
The Cocklebur covers rural policy and politics from a progressive point-of-view. Our work focuses on a tangled rural political reality of dishonest debate, economic and racial disparities, corporate power over our democracy, and disinformation peddled by conservative media outlets. We aim to use facts, data, and science to inform our point-of-view. We wear our complicated love/WTF relationship with rural America on our sleeve.