President Trump has been pushing Congress to send him one “big, beautiful bill” that includes major tax cuts and codifies much of his agenda — an agenda that has relied so far mainly on Executive Orders subject to scrutiny by the courts.
But even some House Republicans are balking at the spending in a reconciliation bill that deficit hawks like Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Andrew Clyde (R-GA) find a far cry from beautiful, despite what Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) insists.
Voting the bill down, Roy said the legislation “does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits.”
That resistance is despite Trump’s demand on X that Republicans “MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL.’”
The Republican naysayers say they aren’t walking away however. They want Trump to get a win on the “big beautiful bill” — after deeper spending cuts are baked in.
Yet even if the bill eventually wins approbation in the House, it would need 60 votes in the Senate — a margin Republicans, with their miniscule majority, can’t provide alone.
And resistance in the Senate, as in the House, isn’t merely political obstructionism, one side looking to thwart the other’s side’s success. Instead, more than any budget legislation in recent memory, the bill poses existential questions about America’s priorities, its safety nets, its social compacts, and just how unfettered its capitalism ought to be.
Saying “we must defeat it,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) quotes a study from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s own Ivy League alma mater, to make the case that the bill is a gift to the very top earners — a gift to the billionaire class that will be paid for by Americans far lower on the income scale.
According to a study by Penn Wharton, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that pays for tax breaks for the rich by cutting Medicaid leads to a $700 LOSS in income for the working class, a $1,000 LOSS in income for the poor & a $389,000 INCREASE for the top 0.1%.
We must defeat it.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 16, 2025
The bill targets Medicaid for what could be $800-plus billion of cuts, which Sanders and Wharton assert will result in a “$700 LOSS in income for the working class, a $1,000 LOSS in income for the poor & a $389,000 INCREASE for the top 0.1%.”
[NOTE: The Wharton Business School is hardly a liberal think tank, and its assessment of the reconciliation bill underscores the messaging Sanders is delivering to crowds across the county in his Fighting Oligarchy tour. The Wharton study Sanders cites is here.]
Though they both object to the legislation, Roy and his associate GOP refuseniks are hardly bedfellows with Sanders on the issue.
Roy and company want more cuts to Medicaid and things like Green New Deal programs — because they see the deficit and the national debt as the biggest risks to America’s future. Sanders, on the other hand, thinks giving major tax cuts to the richest Americans, while scaling back Medicaid and other programs that help the middle and lower income classes, is a deep threat to the social fabric that is essential for democracy’s future.