Tag: Big Beautiful Bill

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Politics Politics Feature

Brother Act

Thom Tillis (Photo: United States Congress | Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

The free world, a term which covers a significant portion — varying from time to time in its dimensions — of these United States, has taken note of the bold stand pursued by U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who this week rebelled against the sheepish instincts of his fellow Republicans in their support of Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill.”

Declaring that, among other things, the bill would drastically undercut the protections extended to the populations of his and other states with severe cuts in Medicaid funding, Tillis publicly declared his opposition to the bill. Knowing that this would land him on Trump’s burgeoning enemies list and ensure that he would face a primary challenge from a Trump acolyte in his reelection bid next year, Tillis went further and, even before the president called for such a thing, said he wouldn’t be running.

An independent streak apparently runs in the Tillis family. The senator’s brother, Rick Tillis, a Lewisburg jeweler and a political moderate like the senator, was for two terms a Republican state representative from District 92 in the Tennessee legislature and ascended to the office of majority whip. But he had difficulty suppressing his sense of anguish at the authoritarian instincts evinced by Glen Casada, the GOP’s house speaker in the 2019 legislative term.

Representative Tillis began operating an anonymous Twitter account entitled “The C.H.B. Blog” (for “Cordell Hull Building Blog”), which mercilessly satirized the speaker’s repressive tactics, including Casada’s clandestine snooping measures against the chamber’s members.

So heavy-handed was Casada’s regime that he was ousted as speaker by his fellow Republicans in the immediate aftermath of that 2019 session, and Tillis’ Twitter barbs had been instrumental in that outcome.

There was payback. A pool of urine was subsequently discovered in one of Tillis’ office chairs, and it was alleged, but never proved, that the donor had been a Casada loyalist.

And Representative Tillis was defeated for reelection in 2020, thanks largely to unusually well-funded support for his primary opponent, largely channeled via a mystery consulting firm called Phoenix Solutions.

In a recent postscript of sorts to the affair, Casada and various others were recently convicted of illegal activities related to the firm, where the former speaker had been a silent partner.

It remains to be seen what degrees of vengeance might end up being leveled at Thom Tillis for his act of apostasy toward Donald Trump, especially since the senator is no longer a candidate for reelection. But the president has long since demonstrated that he is without peer in his zeal for exacting retribution.

Like his brother in Tennessee, however, the senator from North Carolina is clearly unafraid of bullies. It would seem to be a family thing.

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At Large Opinion

Right On, Elon!

We wanted to use an AI imagining of Elon Musk as a squirrel, but it’s against policy. (Photo © Mikhail Bogdanov | Dreamstime.com)

Elon Musk is right.

As I typed those words, I literally shook my head because there is very little I like when it comes to the bizarro bazillionaire from South Africa. I don’t like that he wormed his way into Donald Trump’s inner circle by spending $250 million to help get him elected. I don’t like that after the election Musk was given a pseudo title to run a pseudo government organization called DOGE, under the auspices of which he managed to disassemble critical federal agencies and capriciously fire thousands of federal workers.

I don’t like that while “down-sizing” those federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Musk enabled his team of hackers to access the personal information of every American. Nor do I like that what Musk and his fellow tech bros — and the Trump White House — will do with that information is yet to be determined. (I’m willing to bet it will be financially and politically profitable for a precious few at the top, and will expose the rest of us to data mining of our finances, political views, shopping habits, travel, social media posts, and sexual preferences, to name just a few possibilities.)

And I don’t trust Musk. I don’t trust that his xAI facilities in Memphis will follow environmental regulations if the regulations don’t suit their mercurial CEO. Musk has never played by the rules, and frankly, Memphis lacks the clout to make him do so, should he choose not to. 

But Elon Musk is dead right about one thing: The “big beautiful bill” currently bouncing around the halls of Congress is an absolute environmental disaster. Here’s what Musk posted on his X account: “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country! It’s utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

He is exactly right (and yes, I’m aware he owns an electric car company). The bill proposes to basically reverse what has been U.S. energy policy for years by eliminating billions of dollars in incentives that were slated to go to solar production facilities, wind energy projects, factories to build energy saving appliances, and, yes, electric cars. On the strength of those incentives, billions of dollars in clean energy production investments had been made and construction had moved forward on thousands of projects, large and small. Under the latest incarnation of the BB Bill, that funding would be summarily eliminated, stranding production and construction, and ending what Musk called “millions of jobs.”

The new bill also eliminates consumer subsidies for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other energy-efficient technologies.

And it gets worse. Not content to merely claw back promised investment incentives in clean energy projects, the bill also imposes new taxes on existing wind and solar projects and farms, and penalizes them further if they utilize materials from China, which supplies many of the materials used in the production of renewable energy.

“They’re proposing an outright massacre with punishing new taxes on these industries,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. “It’s a death penalty.”

So why would Republicans cut the legs out from under all the country’s investments in green energy, even the ones benefiting their own states? Here’s a hint: Donald Trump thinks the United States should get its energy from oil drilling and coal mining, as God intended. He campaigned vociferously against green energy because, well, … heavy batteries will sink boats and sharks will eat you? Who knows? It’s Trump. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s been made abundantly clear over the past eight years that Republicans will do whatever Trump wants them to do. The stupid is a feature, not a bug. And besides, global climate change doesn’t exist because windmills will kill bald eagles. So there.

Let’s give the last word on the bill to my new pal, Elon: “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” he said. “Shame on those who voted for it.” Musk added that if the bill is passed, “It would be political suicide for the Republican Party.” Right on, Elon! Let’s hope you’re right again. 

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Reverse Robin Hood: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

The bill robs the poor and gives to the rich. (Photo: Caleb Perez | Unsplash)

President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, May 22nd, ensuring that this farcical moment in United States history will be remembered as one of the cruelest and most moronic. Future textbooks will need to have footnotes explaining that, yes, this actually happened; yes, they actually called the bill the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; and, yes, it was a budget reconciliation bill introduced by the country’s apparent “fiscally conservative party” that experts estimated would add the paltry sum of $3.8 trillion to the national debt. 

The bill seems to derive its name from the big, beautiful, and extremely expensive (for everyday Americans) tax cuts for the incredibly rich. How, though, to pay for such a scheme? 

Rob the poor and give to the rich, of course! The age-old strategy, the timeless truth, that the strong take from the weak and keep for themselves. With America’s clever tax structure, all those savings will begin trickling down any time now. Better ready your umbrellas, readers, because there is no way all those big beautiful dollars will be used to pay lobbyists, invest in deregulation and privatization, or fund vanity joy rides to the stratosphere. 

Since wealthy titans of industry will be creating so many jobs and flooding the economy with their trickled-down riches, there will be little need for social safety net programs. So they’re on the chopping block to help fund this big, beautiful wealth transfer. The bill would reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to the tune of about $267 billion over 10 years. It would also strengthen work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients, including doing away with current exemptions for parents with children under 18. Those exemptions would now only apply to parents with dependents under the age of 7 years old. Because what the nation needs is a bunch of unsupervised 8-year-old latchkey kids. 

Some of the cost of SNAP benefits would be foisted off on the states, which will surely go over well in states like Tennessee, which depend on federal aid to keep the gears turning. In 2028, states would begin to shoulder 5 percent of benefit costs (up from zero) and 75 percent of the program’s administrative costs (an increase of 25 percent, up from half the admin costs). 

It’s nonsensical. It’s absurd. And it’s getting more and more difficult to imagine that everyone wants to solve the complicated problems our country faces, but can’t agree on the means to do so. It almost seems as though the People-in-Charge want a poorly educated populace, with everyone working two or three part-time jobs without benefits and renting everything their parents used to own. 

There’s more to the bill than kicking the poor while they’re down, of course. It also sets out to kneecap some of former President Joe Biden’s environmental protections, allow increased leasing of public lands for mining and drilling, increase taxes on university endowments, and — at long last! — shuffle a measly additional $150 billion over to the Defense Department, to give America’s grossly underfunded military a much-needed shot in the arm. 

This bill is so cartoonishly avaricious as to make The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns blush — and he’s an actual cartoon! A cartoon character who once tried to sell Springfield sunlight, who has a closet full of evening wear made from the pelts of endangered animals. He’s a cartoon character who, quite famously, once actually tried to take candy from a baby! 

This cannot continue. Every American — including those one-issue voters whose ballots were cast based solely on anti-abortion sentiment or fear for their right to bear arms — should be disgusted by the absolute lack of morality evidenced by the budget this bill proposes. 

It’s this simple: If our nation is strong, it can afford to protect its most vulnerable. If it’s great, it doesn’t need to deny food assistance to children or medical care to the poor. So do we have the strength to help those in need? Do we have the strength to be truly great? 

Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, have never taken candy from a baby.