Tag: voters
Ron Johnson

'It All Falls Apart': GOP Senate Lacks Majority To Pass Trump's Big Ugly Bill

In a rare admission of uncertainty, Republican senators are privately conceding that President Donald Trump’s "Big, Beautiful Bill" may “fall apart” before the self-imposed July 4 deadline, Semafor reported Thursday.

Trump is reportedly banking on his signature hardball tactics in trying to secure passage of the legislation by Independence Day. However, GOP lawmakers say that strategy is faltering in the Senate amid mounting procedural hurdles and internal dissent, per the report.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Semafor: “I like the president, I respect him, I certainly respect how difficult his job is. I don’t want to make it more difficult. But we can’t keep mortgaging our kids’ future. And he understands that about me."

Sen. Johnson is currently against the bill and is said to have banded with two fellow conservative senators as a bloc: “We all have to be a yes before any of us are a yes," he said.

According to the report, the bill is not only short of sufficient support right now, but is also boasting a hefty amount of blank space for now. That’s because Republicans are still hustling to win approval for provisions that their nonpartisan rules referee deemed ineligible for protection from a Democratic filibuster.

Since it’s difficult to estimate the costs or effects of passage anymore, senators are trying to slow the rush to finish a bill that will affect almost every American in some way.

Meanwhile, as lawmakers prepared to scrap their weekend and recess plans, Trump invited some Republicans to a Thursday event that amounted to what one called a “mass arm-twisting," per Semafor.

One person close to the White House, who was not identified in the report, told Semafor that the president needs to change the deadline.

“He has to shift the deadline, or it all falls apart,” the source said, per the report. “Procedurally, how would it get on his desk by July 4? They don’t have the votes and a bunch of it the parliamentarian gutted," they added.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Policies Poised To Devastate His Voters In Rural America

Trump Policies Poised To Devastate His Voters In Rural America

Everyone is talking, understandably, about Iran. But the rest of Donald Trump’s policy agenda continues to goose-step on. Radical changes in social spending, immigration policy, and tariffs — changes that will hurt tens of millions of Americans — are either about to start or are already happening.

And one point I haven’t seen emphasized much is that while the human damage from these policies will be very widespread, it will be especially severe in rural areas and small towns — the very areas that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

First, consider the shape of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. (I think it’s important to call it by its ludicrous official name, as a reminder of the extent to which Republican members of Congress have become North Korea-style sycophants.) The final details haven’t been settled, and there’s still an outside chance that the whole thing falls apart. But it’s almost certain that there will be savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that disproportionately help Trump-supporting rural areas.

Let’s talk about Medicaid first, a program that is far more important than most affluent Americans tend to realize. Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

The same is true for OBBB’s deep cuts to food stamps.

The damage will be magnified by Republican plans to cut Medicaid spending by adding work requirements. We know from repeated experience that such requirements don’t actually lead to significant increases in employment. What they do instead is block access to health care by creating bureaucratic hurdles for beneficiaries — hurdles that rural Americans, often burdened by limited formal education and inadequate internet access, find especially hard to overcome.

Furthermore, rural America has long had a problem of hospital closures: It’s hard for hospitals to stay in business given both low population density and limited ability of patients to pay. The Beautiful Bill will accelerate this trend, so that even rural residents who can afford care may very well find it geographically out of reach.

In addition, federal health spending, both Medicaid and Medicare, is disproportionately important in supporting rural and left-behind local economies. For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

Then there are Trump’s immigration policies. American agriculture relies heavily on hired workers — and around two thirds of these hired workers are immigrants. A majority of these foreign-born workers are undocumented:

Moreover, even if you a legal resident or even a native-born citizen, do you really feel safe if ICE thinks you look like an illegal immigrant? Not surprisingly, there are reports of widespread ICE raids on farms and of workers refusing to work out of fear of arrest and deportation.

Can immigrant workers be replaced with native-born workers, or even with legal immigrants? No. All indications are that few native-born Americans would be willing to do these jobs unless they were paid much higher wages. Under the Biden administration the U.S. introduced a program offering grants to farmers who bring in foreign workers legally — but the Trump administration has frozen funding for that program, including money that had already been promised, leaving farmers on the hook for many thousands of dollars.

So Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are inflicting will be a major blow to U.S. agriculture — to family farms that employ immigrant workers and are being left high and dry, to food processing and local retail. Like Medicaid, immigrant farm labor directly and indirectly supports many rural jobs for the native-born.

Finally, there’s the trade war. In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports:

Nor can you argue that farmers will make up for lost exports by producing goods we currently import, since we mainly import the farm products we can’t produce here. That’s a point that seems to be lost on Trump’s Commerce Secretary. Recently Howard Lutnick clashed with Rep. Madeline Dean over the impact of tariffs on prices of food items including bananas. “If you build in America … there will be no tariff,” Lutnick argued. “We cannot build bananas in America,” she replied, somehow managing to avoid saying “Duh.”

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his daily Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

MAGA Voters Like Trump's Big Bill -- Until They Learn What It Does

MAGA Voters Like Trump's Big Bill -- Until They Learn What It Does

Reported by Phil Galewitz

Nearly two-thirds of adults oppose President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” approved in May by the House of Representatives, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released on June 17.

And even Trump’s most ardent supporters like the legislation a lot less when they learn how it would cut federal spending on health programs, the poll shows.

The KFF poll found that about 61 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — and 72 percent of the subset who identify with Trump’s “Make American Great Again” movement — support the bill, which would extend many of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts while reducing spending on domestic programs, including cutting billions from Medicaid.

But when pollsters told survey respondents about the bill’s consequences for health care, opposition grew, including among MAGA supporters.

For example, after being told that the bill would decrease funding for local hospitals and increase the number of people without health insurance, support among those who back MAGA dropped more than 20 percentage points — resulting in fewer than half the group still backing the bill.

Ashley Kirzinger, KFF’s director of survey methodology and associate director of its Public Opinion and Survey Research program, said it’s no surprise polling shows that party affiliation affects how most of the public views the bill.

“But the poll shows that support, even among MAGA supporters, drops drastically once the public hears more about how the bill could impact local hospitals and reduce Medicaid coverage,” she said.

“This shows how the partisan lens wears slightly when the public learns more about how the legislation could affect them and their families.”

KFF is a health policy research, polling, and news organization that includes KFF Health News.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who won passage of the legislation in the chamber he controls by a single vote on May 22, has insisted the bill would not “cut Medicaid.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which calculates the effects of legislation on the nation’s deficits and debt, says the measure would reduce federal spending on Medicaid by $793 billion over 10 years, resulting in nearly 8 million more people becoming uninsured.

The bill is encountering strident opposition from the health industry, most notably hospitals that expect to see large cuts in funding as a result of millions of people losing Medicaid coverage. The House-passed legislation would increase the frequency of eligibility checks and require that most nondisabled adults regularly prove they are working, studying, or volunteering at least 80 hours a month to keep their coverage.

“This is common sense,” Johnson said May 25 on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “And when the American people understand what we are doing here, they applaud it.”

Critics say the bill marks the latest attempt by Republicans to roll back the Affordable Care Act.

As the Senate moves toward a possible vote on its version of the legislation before Independence Day, the KFF poll shows Medicaid and the ACA are more popular than ever.

About 83 percent of adults support Medicaid, including large majorities of Democrats (93 percent), independents (83 percent), and Republicans (74 percent). That’s up from 77 percent in January, with the poll finding the biggest jump in favorability among Republicans.

Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program cover about 78 million people who are disabled or have low incomes.

About two-thirds of adults hold favorable views of the ACA, the most since the law’s enactment in 2010, as recorded in KFF polls. The law has only been consistently popular with a majority of adults since about 2021.

Views of the ACA remain split along partisan lines, with most Republicans (63 percent) holding unfavorable views and most Democrats (94 percent) and independents (71 percent) viewing it favorably.

The poll found other indications that the public may not understand key provisions of the GOP bill, including its work requirements.

The poll finds two-thirds of the public — including the vast majority of Republicans (88 percent) and MAGA supporters (93 percent) and half (51 percent) of Democrats — initially support requiring nearly all adults on Medicaid to prove they are working or looking for work, in school, or doing community service, with exceptions such as for caregivers and people with disabilities.

However, attitudes toward this provision shifted dramatically when respondents were presented with more information.

For example, when told most adults with Medicaid are already working or unable to work, and that those individuals could lose coverage due to the challenge of documenting it, about half of supporters changed their view, resulting in nearly two-thirds of adults opposing Medicaid work requirements and about a third supporting them.

The poll of 1,321 adults was conducted online and by telephone June 4-8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Top GOP Pollster: Trump Budget Will Hurt 'A Great Many' Of His Voters

Top GOP Pollster: Trump Budget Will Hurt 'A Great Many' Of His Voters

The impact of President Donald Trump's so-called "Big Beautiful Bill Act" will be felt acutely in areas that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, according to one Republican pollster.

Politico reported on Monday that the administration is now embracing a "stark messaging shift" as it attempts to shepherd the massive legislative package through the U.S. Senate. While the White House has insisted that the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid (which provides health insurance to low-income and disabled Americans) would only be for "waste, fraud and abuse," administration officials are now notably pivoting to saying that the bill will be focused on "kicking illegal immigrants off of the program and implementing commonsense work requirements."

Even though the Senate has a 53-47 Republican majority, Politico observed that even talk of cutting Medicaid funding is "politically delicate." This has resulted in the administration hoping to re-define "cuts" to voters – rather than outright cutting benefits, the administration aims to impose different forms of austerity like increased eligibility redeterminations and additional work requirements that stipulate Medicaid recipients have to jump through additional hoops to get health insurance.

Some senators like Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) have expressed hesitancy about the additional bureaucratic roadblocks that the proposed enhanced work requirements would create, while others like Josh Hawley (R-MO) have spoken out specifically against cutting Medicaid due to the high number of constituents who depend on it.

Aside from the difficulties the administration faces in getting 51 votes out of 53 senators (or 50 votes with Vice President JD Vance as the tie-breaker), Politico reported that there could also be backlash among Republican voters depending on the scope of the cuts in the final bill. Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the outlet that he doubted voters would be able to distinguish "reforms" from "cuts," especially if they're directly affected.

“The fact remains that a great many Trump voters are on Medicaid, particularly in rural areas,” Ayres said. “If no one loses coverage, how are you going to cut $500 billion?”

Even strident conservatives among the Senate Republican Conference have pledged to oppose the bill in its current form. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI ) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have been sounding the alarm about the bill's projected cost ballooning the federal deficit by more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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