| From | The American Prospect <[email protected]> |
| Subject | Senate Irresistible Forces Meet Immovable Objects |
| Date | June 2, 2025 10:02 AM |
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Tracking Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
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Senate Irresistible Forces Meet Immovable Objects
In our first installment of 'Trump's Beautiful Disaster,' we tee up the battle over the giant tax and spending bill in the
Senate.
??
??
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
By David Dayen
Welcome to the inaugural edition of "Trump's Beautiful Disaster," our pop-up newsletter covering what has improbably been labeled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (really, "Bill Act"), agenda-spanning legislation that would radically overhaul the tax code, the social safety net, and the relationship of Americans to their government. Between now and the final outcome of the bill-either its passage or its demise-the
**Prospect** will bring you up-to-the-minute coverage on what's included in the legislation, why it matters for you, and whether it can navigate the House and Senate successfully.
Eye on the Senate
We come to our story in the middle. The House has passed OBBBA (let's just go with that as a shorthand) and the action has shifted to the Senate. After the Memorial Day break, this is the first week that the Senate has had an opportunity to look at the legislation.
Normally, with a bill of
this magnitude, that would trigger committee work and markup hearings and a drawn-out process. But there are literally only 13 legislative days between now and the July 4 "deadline" for final passage. So having Senate Republicans actually doing their jobs as lawmakers isn't in the cards. There are indications that the Senate will not engage in any committee work on the most potentially impactful legislation of the past few decades.
That doesn't mean that the Senate will simply rubber-stamp the House's product, even if that's what Trump's base wants [link removed]. Basic pride dictates that senators justify their existence in some way. And since their initial messaging rollout [link removed] of "Aren't we
**all** going to die someday, really" isn't panning
out, the senators might want to actually make the bill a bit more palatable to non-necrophiles.
Alas, what seems to be the actual direction among the loudest Senate Republican dissenters is that the bill doesn't cut spending enough. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who's usually on an island when it comes to fiscal policy, is a known problem that doesn't threaten the bill. But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) seems to actually mean business [link removed], and with Rick Scott (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) at his back, the deficit hawks have the numbers to stop the legislation short of a majority. And there are House Freedom Caucus hard-liners [link removed] who are backing the Senate hawks up, to say nothing of former special government employee Elon Musk
[link removed].
What's going to appease this faction? With its massive tax cuts not offset by its massive spending cuts, OBBBA costs anywhere between $2.5 trillion and $3.1 trillion [link removed] over the next decade, and probably a little more [link removed] after last-minute negotiations in the House led to more tax giveaways. The claim from the Senate is that the extension of the Trump tax cuts, which comes to about $3.8 trillion, doesn't count, because that just extends current policy into the future. This is how a bill with trillions in red ink is being sold as an overall spending cut.
Sen. Johnson seems to agree with the current policy baseline
canard. It sounds like he sees this bill as a vehicle to reduce the structural revenue gap [link removed], the long-term difference between spending and taxes. To get to the "pre-pandemic baseline [link removed]," he would require $6 trillion in additional cuts. But Johnson's problem is that the quieter critics in the Senate are mostly pushing from the other direction, toward softening the large spending cuts in the bill. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and others want to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts, which they note go beyond attacking "waste, fraud and abuse." Others want to preserve [link removed] Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for energy producers,
particularly in their states. The Energy Four-Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), John Curtis (R-UT), and Jerry Moran (R-KS)-have numbers to rival the fiscal hawks. And there are others who have criticized the IRA cuts, which were made deeper at the end of the House process. So there's not a lot of give here.
Because the Senate already passed [link removed] a no-tax-on-tips policy as a stand-alone item, they could probably pull that from the bill. But that only saves them $40 billion over a decade. A bigger potential windfall stems from the fact that there are no SALTers-defenders of changing the cap on the state and local tax deduction, which would benefit high-income constituents in high-tax states-in the Senate Republican caucus. (In the Senate, those states are all represented by Democrats.) If there's a standoff between the hawks and the doves, and
they need more money to balance out the bill, they can always raid SALT by tightening up that cap. The late-in-the-game increase of the cap from $30,000 to $40,000 cost about $100 billion [link removed] according to federal estimates; you could see the Senate pushing that right back. But that would complicate passage in the House, where some Republicans represent districts with constituents who'll benefit from a high cap.
A further headache is what the Senate parliamentarian will rule out of order in the budget reconciliation process. Smaller measures, like a bizarre attempt to prevent courts from enforcing contempt citations, barring state-based regulation of artificial intelligence (more on that below), defunding Planned Parenthood, streamlining energy permitting, and removing gun silencers from regulatory oversight, could face the parliamentarian's knife. But the
current policy baseline would be the big one, because if the parliamentarian determines that scoring method (in which extending trillion-dollar tax cuts doesn't affect the deficit) ineligible, suddenly the Senate bill would have a giant $3 trillion hole, only exacerbating the fiscal hawk divide.
Of course, the Senate's recent ignoring of the parliamentarian in a Congressional Review Act deliberation could have been a test run for ignoring her in OBBBA. And all the squawking now about red lines and demands in the Senate mirrors what we saw in the House until everyone locked arms and passed the bill. At the end of the day, taking money from the poor to give tax cuts to the rich, sadly, isn't that heavy a lift for modern Republicans. It's been at the core of the conservative project [link removed] for decades. And we shouldn't be surprised if the details fade away and
they just take the leap by passing it.
[link removed]
Artificial Deregulation
We have a couple of stories at prospect.org [link removed] today looking at one particular provision in OBBBA mentioned above: the ten-year ban on state regulations on artificial intelligence. This would have wide-reaching implications for virtually anything in the economy that uses machine learning or an algorithm. Therefore there has been a great hunt for which lobbyists managed to get this into the bill; the real estate price-setting firm RealPage [link removed] is now under scrutiny for this.
Staff writer Whitney Wimbish looks
[link removed] at how autonomous vehicle regulation would really be shut down nationwide by this provision, since there are no federal restrictions on self-driving cars. And contributor Dan Boguslaw looks [link removed] at a separate bipartisan bill led by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that would represent something of a final possibility to rein in AI if this OBBBA provision passes. The Grassley bill would allow whistleblowers working on AI to come forward with greater protections.
[link removed]
Other Big Beautiful Thoughts
* Mike Konczal harks back to 2000s-era internet comic Lucky Ducky
[link removed] to describe what Republicans are doing in this bill. (Substack)
* The "No Tax on Social Security" provision has nothing to do [link removed] with cutting taxes on Social Security; it's just an temporary extra deduction for senior citizens, whether they're on Social Security or not. (
**The Wall Street Journal**)
* The cuts to the Affordable Care Act, mostly in the form of changing enrollment and reimbursement rules from the Biden administration, would separate four million people [link removed] from health coverage, per Jonathan Cohn. (The xxxxxx)
* I'd expect Section 899 of the bill, a tax on foreign investors, to come out, because
Wall Street is totally freaking out [link removed] about it. (
**Financial Times**)
* How OBBBA changes the food system [link removed], by subsidizing industrial agriculture and slashing assistance for climate-smart farming. (Grist)
We want to hear from you. If you're a Hill staffer, policymaker, or subject-matter expert with something to say about the Big Beautiful Bill, or if there's something in the legislation you want us to report about, write us at info(at)prospect.org.
To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe.?? [link removed]
Click to Share this
Newsletter
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Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here [link removed].
To
manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].
View this email in your browser [link removed]
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??
Senate Irresistible Forces Meet Immovable Objects
In our first installment of 'Trump's Beautiful Disaster,' we tee up the battle over the giant tax and spending bill in the
Senate.
??
??
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
By David Dayen
Welcome to the inaugural edition of "Trump's Beautiful Disaster," our pop-up newsletter covering what has improbably been labeled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (really, "Bill Act"), agenda-spanning legislation that would radically overhaul the tax code, the social safety net, and the relationship of Americans to their government. Between now and the final outcome of the bill-either its passage or its demise-the
**Prospect** will bring you up-to-the-minute coverage on what's included in the legislation, why it matters for you, and whether it can navigate the House and Senate successfully.
Eye on the Senate
We come to our story in the middle. The House has passed OBBBA (let's just go with that as a shorthand) and the action has shifted to the Senate. After the Memorial Day break, this is the first week that the Senate has had an opportunity to look at the legislation.
Normally, with a bill of
this magnitude, that would trigger committee work and markup hearings and a drawn-out process. But there are literally only 13 legislative days between now and the July 4 "deadline" for final passage. So having Senate Republicans actually doing their jobs as lawmakers isn't in the cards. There are indications that the Senate will not engage in any committee work on the most potentially impactful legislation of the past few decades.
That doesn't mean that the Senate will simply rubber-stamp the House's product, even if that's what Trump's base wants [link removed]. Basic pride dictates that senators justify their existence in some way. And since their initial messaging rollout [link removed] of "Aren't we
**all** going to die someday, really" isn't panning
out, the senators might want to actually make the bill a bit more palatable to non-necrophiles.
Alas, what seems to be the actual direction among the loudest Senate Republican dissenters is that the bill doesn't cut spending enough. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who's usually on an island when it comes to fiscal policy, is a known problem that doesn't threaten the bill. But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) seems to actually mean business [link removed], and with Rick Scott (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) at his back, the deficit hawks have the numbers to stop the legislation short of a majority. And there are House Freedom Caucus hard-liners [link removed] who are backing the Senate hawks up, to say nothing of former special government employee Elon Musk
[link removed].
What's going to appease this faction? With its massive tax cuts not offset by its massive spending cuts, OBBBA costs anywhere between $2.5 trillion and $3.1 trillion [link removed] over the next decade, and probably a little more [link removed] after last-minute negotiations in the House led to more tax giveaways. The claim from the Senate is that the extension of the Trump tax cuts, which comes to about $3.8 trillion, doesn't count, because that just extends current policy into the future. This is how a bill with trillions in red ink is being sold as an overall spending cut.
Sen. Johnson seems to agree with the current policy baseline
canard. It sounds like he sees this bill as a vehicle to reduce the structural revenue gap [link removed], the long-term difference between spending and taxes. To get to the "pre-pandemic baseline [link removed]," he would require $6 trillion in additional cuts. But Johnson's problem is that the quieter critics in the Senate are mostly pushing from the other direction, toward softening the large spending cuts in the bill. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and others want to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts, which they note go beyond attacking "waste, fraud and abuse." Others want to preserve [link removed] Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for energy producers,
particularly in their states. The Energy Four-Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), John Curtis (R-UT), and Jerry Moran (R-KS)-have numbers to rival the fiscal hawks. And there are others who have criticized the IRA cuts, which were made deeper at the end of the House process. So there's not a lot of give here.
Because the Senate already passed [link removed] a no-tax-on-tips policy as a stand-alone item, they could probably pull that from the bill. But that only saves them $40 billion over a decade. A bigger potential windfall stems from the fact that there are no SALTers-defenders of changing the cap on the state and local tax deduction, which would benefit high-income constituents in high-tax states-in the Senate Republican caucus. (In the Senate, those states are all represented by Democrats.) If there's a standoff between the hawks and the doves, and
they need more money to balance out the bill, they can always raid SALT by tightening up that cap. The late-in-the-game increase of the cap from $30,000 to $40,000 cost about $100 billion [link removed] according to federal estimates; you could see the Senate pushing that right back. But that would complicate passage in the House, where some Republicans represent districts with constituents who'll benefit from a high cap.
A further headache is what the Senate parliamentarian will rule out of order in the budget reconciliation process. Smaller measures, like a bizarre attempt to prevent courts from enforcing contempt citations, barring state-based regulation of artificial intelligence (more on that below), defunding Planned Parenthood, streamlining energy permitting, and removing gun silencers from regulatory oversight, could face the parliamentarian's knife. But the
current policy baseline would be the big one, because if the parliamentarian determines that scoring method (in which extending trillion-dollar tax cuts doesn't affect the deficit) ineligible, suddenly the Senate bill would have a giant $3 trillion hole, only exacerbating the fiscal hawk divide.
Of course, the Senate's recent ignoring of the parliamentarian in a Congressional Review Act deliberation could have been a test run for ignoring her in OBBBA. And all the squawking now about red lines and demands in the Senate mirrors what we saw in the House until everyone locked arms and passed the bill. At the end of the day, taking money from the poor to give tax cuts to the rich, sadly, isn't that heavy a lift for modern Republicans. It's been at the core of the conservative project [link removed] for decades. And we shouldn't be surprised if the details fade away and
they just take the leap by passing it.
[link removed]
Artificial Deregulation
We have a couple of stories at prospect.org [link removed] today looking at one particular provision in OBBBA mentioned above: the ten-year ban on state regulations on artificial intelligence. This would have wide-reaching implications for virtually anything in the economy that uses machine learning or an algorithm. Therefore there has been a great hunt for which lobbyists managed to get this into the bill; the real estate price-setting firm RealPage [link removed] is now under scrutiny for this.
Staff writer Whitney Wimbish looks
[link removed] at how autonomous vehicle regulation would really be shut down nationwide by this provision, since there are no federal restrictions on self-driving cars. And contributor Dan Boguslaw looks [link removed] at a separate bipartisan bill led by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that would represent something of a final possibility to rein in AI if this OBBBA provision passes. The Grassley bill would allow whistleblowers working on AI to come forward with greater protections.
[link removed]
Other Big Beautiful Thoughts
* Mike Konczal harks back to 2000s-era internet comic Lucky Ducky
[link removed] to describe what Republicans are doing in this bill. (Substack)
* The "No Tax on Social Security" provision has nothing to do [link removed] with cutting taxes on Social Security; it's just an temporary extra deduction for senior citizens, whether they're on Social Security or not. (
**The Wall Street Journal**)
* The cuts to the Affordable Care Act, mostly in the form of changing enrollment and reimbursement rules from the Biden administration, would separate four million people [link removed] from health coverage, per Jonathan Cohn. (The xxxxxx)
* I'd expect Section 899 of the bill, a tax on foreign investors, to come out, because
Wall Street is totally freaking out [link removed] about it. (
**Financial Times**)
* How OBBBA changes the food system [link removed], by subsidizing industrial agriculture and slashing assistance for climate-smart farming. (Grist)
We want to hear from you. If you're a Hill staffer, policymaker, or subject-matter expert with something to say about the Big Beautiful Bill, or if there's something in the legislation you want us to report about, write us at info(at)prospect.org.
To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to subscribe.?? [link removed]
Click to Share this
Newsletter
[link removed]
??
[link removed]
??
[link removed]
??
[link removed]
??
??
[link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here [link removed].
To
manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].
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