Megabill Primer

A reset on the basics, including why Trump helps and hurts legislating.

I want to be a good guide to the process going on right now with the Republican megabill, and…I just don’t really know what to tell you. Something will pass. At some point. It will be unpopular. And beyond that? No idea.

The current plan is apparently to start voting on the bill this week on the Senate floor and get it to the president before July 4. As of now, however, there are a series of revolts in the Senate and the House, and it’s not clear where or how the majorities needed to pass the thing can be constructed. Or how long it will take. The whole thing is unusually murky.

Still, the basic facts are fairly straightforward. The bill polls badly – about twenty percentage points under water, give or take, in multiple polls. That’s because many of the core provisions are unpopular. Voters really don’t like tax cuts for rich people. They don’t like cuts for health care programs – in this case Medicaid in particular. Indeed, people generally like more spending, not less, on a whole lot of government programs. (They’ll also claim in polls to care about federal budget deficits, but it’s very unlikely that there’s much to that).¹

So, with an unpopular but very ambitious bill in front of them and tiny majorities in both chambers, the task for Republicans isn’t easy.

On top of that, they have a president who isn’t doing much to sell the bill, and who isn’t a reliable source of policy leadership. Donald Trump seems to care most about his campaign-gimmick tax cuts (e.g. not taxing tips), but that’s about it. His public comments are mainly about the importance of passing the bill, not setting priorities, and I suspect the same is true behind the scenes as well.

That said: The core of the bill – the tax cuts, the spending cuts, and the spending increases for programs Republicans do like – are the GOP consensus agenda and have been since Paul Ryan or, going back more, Newt Gingrich.² They want this thing to pass, even if they disagree quite a bit on the specifics.

What’s more, it’s not just the new tax cuts at play; the old ones are expiring, and so renewing those is a must-past situation. They also have the problem of having to pass a debt limit increase this summer, which they very much don’t like voting for and couldn’t do as a stand-along bill. Passing the megabill, with a debt limit increase included, solves that one. So this bill, with tons of stuff in it, doesn’t have to pass, but something extending the tax cuts and increasing the debt limit does have to pass.

And while Trump makes it harder to put the bill together, he also does help by putting heavy pressure on congressional Republicans to vote for whatever the final bill will be. That’s not a clincher, necessarily, but it should help at the final-vote stage.

The details matter, and the fights over them are likely very sincere. Plenty of Republicans want extremely deep cuts to Medicaid; others want much more modest versions. Those in states with high income taxes, almost all in the House, really care about getting specific tax relief for their districts. Others actively oppose those particular tax cuts. Some have strong ideological reasons to reserve climate-friendly spending; others don’t want to lose lucrative, job-creating projects in their districts.

My guess is that this thing would pass with very narrow margins even if Republicans had comfortable majorities – there are a lot of people who wish they could be in the Vote No, Hope Yes caucus. But there’s only room for about three in both chambers.

At the same time, a lot of goodies (for very conservative Republicans, that is) are gone from the bill because they didn’t fit within the rules governing this kind of (“reconciliation”) bill in the Senate – necessary because otherwise the bill would need 60 votes to defeat a Democratic filibuster, and there are only 53 Republicans. That would seem to make the bill harder to pass, but perhaps not. So far at least, there’s been hardly any push to change Senate rules and procedures to allow those provisions back in.³ That could be because Republican Senators strongly support the filibuster, but it also could be because they don’t actually care much about enacting these particular provisions into law.

One more thing worth emphasizing for those trying to make sense of what various Republicans are saying: None of them are serious when they claim to want smaller budget deficits. This bill massively increases the deficit, and they’re all okay with that. What they do differ on is how much to cut the programs they don’t like. But as far as I can tell not a single Republican in either chamber would back down on the central tax cuts here. It is possible that some of them would cut spending enough to make up for the lost revenue, but given that it won’t happen – leaving a choice between larger deficits or smaller tax cuts – they all prefer the tax cuts. Nor are any of them refusing to vote for it unless, say, Social Security benefits were slashed. For some reason, the media convention is to take GOP claims about deficits at face value, but it ain’t so.

So: Something has to pass. It won’t be a bill that they’re particularly happy with. It will be unpopular.

Just guessing, but I sort of expect at least one, and maybe two or three, crises before final passage in which it looks as if the whole thing is falling apart. That could involve an unexpected delay, or it could even involve the bill losing one or more key vote in the Senate or the House. But again, the tax cuts and the debt limit increase are must-passes, even if everything else falls out. And to get the votes, many of the parts of the bill may have to stay in. In other words, even if they think the bill is a lemon they may not have any better option. But again, that part is mostly speculation; it’s also possible to imagine a stripped-down bill with only tax cuts and the debt limit increase. Or anywhere in between that and the full-blown megabill.

1. Cutting overall spending is popular in the abstract, but specific cuts to specific agencies and specific programs or even to general categories such as “education” or “health care” are rarely popular. This makes it plausible to run on cutting spending, but a lot harder to build support while governing for any plan to implement those cuts, since any such plan has to detail what’s to be reduced.

2. Okay, in some cases that’s not literally true, because they’re trying to overtturn things that were enacted during the Biden or Obama presidencies. So Newt wasn’t gunning for those in the 1990s. But the basic policy orientation is the same. There’s very little here that would reflect any realignment or new constituencies that may have joined the GOP over the last decade.

3. That would only require a simple majority, but it would also be the end of the legislative filibuster, and there don’t seem to be 50 votes (plus the vice-president) do to it.