The passage of Donald Trump’s budget bill has sparked outrage from Democrats, setting off a fierce barrage of criticism that could signal the kind of attack the party might launch against Republicans in next year’s midterm elections. Party leaders issued a series of statements after the massive tax and spending bill passed on Thursday, showing enough anger to peel paint off a brick house. “Today, Donald Trump and the Republican Party sent a message to America: If you’re not a billionaire, we don’t care about you,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin. “While the Republican Party of Rio continues to cash the checks of its billionaire donors, their constituents will go hungry, lose critical health care, lose their jobs — and yes, some will die — as a result of this bill. Democrats are rallying to make sure everyone knows who is responsible for one of the worst bills in our nation’s history.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Thursday that the bill passed the House without Democratic support and with only two negative votes from Republicans, “not normal.”
Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the inconsistencies in the bill that Democrats could campaign on for the next two years, including the prioritization of 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 and that the TIPS tax break for people making less than $25,000 a year would expire in three years.
She said the cuts to Medicaid expansion would disqualify workers from Medicaid eligibility and eliminate subsidies for insurance under the Affordable Care Act and reduce SNAP food assistance benefits.
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“I don’t think anyone was prepared for what was done to ICE,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on BlueSky. “This is not a simple budget increase. This is an explosion — it makes ICE bigger than the FBI, the US Bureau of Prisons, [the] DEA, and others. It’s designed to make everything that happens look like child’s play. And people are hiding.”
Many critics said that Republicans’ comments before the bill passed reflected a lack of concern for their constituents.
Punchbowl News reported that Senator Mitch McConnell told fellow Republicans in a closed-door meeting last week: “I know a lot of us are hearing from people across the country about Medicaid. But they’re going to get through this.”
Speaking at a combative town hall in Parkersburg in late May, Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst responded to cries that people would die without protection by saying, “People … are not okay, we’re all going to die” — a response that drew gasps.
The Democratic response to the bill has focused on cuts to Medicaid.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib described the bill as “disgusting” and “an act of violence against our communities.”
She added: “Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for saying, ‘Forget it,’ because we’re all going to die. They are responsible for the 50,000 people who die needlessly every year because of this deadly budget overreach.”
“There’s no doubt about it. This is a dark day for our country,” wrote Senator Raphael Warnock.
“Republicans in Washington have decided to sell out working people. As a result, millions of people will lose their health care coverage, and millions more will see their premiums increase. Rural hospitals and nursing homes across Georgia will be forced to close. Children will be forced to starve so that they can give billionaires another tax cut.” But budget activists on both the left and the right have questioned the impact the budget will have on the already substantial national debt. “In a major fiscal capitulation, Congress has passed the most expensive, dishonest and irresponsible budget compromise bill ever — and it comes at a time when fiscal conditions are already precarious,” said Maya McKee, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group.
T. “The fascists want to please Trump, protect the poor and push small businesses as a policy.”
