In retrospect, the best piece I wrote on the budget reconciliation process this year was probably Day 40: Republicans Contemplate Giving Up On Deficit Control Forever. It was my reaction to learning that GOP members of the U.S. Senate “might simply decide that they can pretend that extending the tax cuts won’t cost a single dime.” Day 40 is a wonky piece but worth a re-read, and not only because the Senate really did decide to take that step. It basically describes what actually wound up happening overall.

The piece focuses primarily on budget hawks among the House Republicans, who I identified as the biggest potential obstacle to passing what was soon known as the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB).  At the outset, I made the following observation:

How much do Republicans love tax cuts for rich people? Other than cruelty, they are their favorite thing in the whole world, and can trump every other principle they claim to hold dear.

I didn’t assume this would happen, but I went into a lot of detail about why it might. And I acknowledged that I had up to that point simply failed to have the imagination to predict something so radical as changing how the budget is scored so that extending existing programs doesn’t cost any money.

I think the main thing working in this idea’s favor is that the entire legislative agenda of the fascist regime will be dead in the water if the Republicans cannot figure out a way to pass it through reconciliation. Since I cannot see any way the GOP can get enough unanimity do this under the current rules, I have long assumed they’d have to change the rules. But this is a more desperate and radical attempt at a solution than I had contemplated.

My Day 40 piece explains why Trump’s 2017 tax cuts needed to be extended at all. It has to do with the rules of budget reconciliation which proscribe adding to the deficit outside a 10 year window. The easy way to do this is to have the tax cuts go away in the tenth year. But this time around, the OBBB secures “permanent extension of the rates and brackets of the 2017 individual tax cuts.” This shouldn’t be possible since it will result trillions of added debt, but the budget scoring change makes it possible. Right away, I understood that the prospect of permanent tax cuts might entice the budget hawks to sign off on massive deficit spending.

Now, if you’re expecting the deficit hawks, like Rep. Chip Roy of  Texas,  to reject this fraud out of hand because it would go against everything they’ve been saying and negotiating for in terms of deficit reduction, you’ll be disappointed.  He’s enticed by the idea that this scam might allow the Trump tax cuts not only to be extended for another ten years but permanently, because it will get around restraints in the budget reconciliation rules.

“We should be careful with things like that, that can get kind of gimmicky,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said. “I’m intrigued by the possibility of permanence. I think that’s a good thing. I think permanent tax rates are good for the country. … However, I don’t like gimmicks, so I’m trying to wrestle with that.”

That’s one of the most understated statements I’ve ever seen. One moment, he’s acting as a royal pain in the ass who uses the catastrophic economic risks associated with a failure to raise the debt ceiling to force massive cuts in federal spending, and the next he is signing off on a system that will treat every existing government spending program as “free” in perpetuity so long as it continues at current rates.

Representatives like Chip Roy may have wrestled with the gimmickry involved, but they ultimately caved.

It would be wrong, however, to say that they caved eagerly or willingly. In many ways they caved for the same reasons as so-called “moderate” Republicans caved, which is that the process was set up so that ” the entire legislative agenda of the fascist regime [would] be dead in the water” if the OBBB didn’t pass. Not only would the Trump tax cuts expire, but the Republicans would have to find a way to raise the debt ceiling all on their own without the cover of hiding it inside a giant bill. Truthfully, they knew they could never find the votes to do this and it would force them to enter into negotiations with the Democrats. That is something they cannot afford to do if they want to let Trump govern without any brakes from Congress.

As I wrote many times, the consequences of failure were so severe that this alone was the best chance of success for the OBBB. But I confess I am just a little shocked at just how badly this turned out for the House Republicans.

Let’s start with the bill the House worked on all year. It was a hot piece of garbage that they detested. On the merits, it had no chance of passing. But the House Republicans passed it anyway for four reasons. The most important was that they wanted to pass it off to the Senate before the Memorial Day weekend. Let them have the hot potato. The second was the moderates were promised that the Senate would make the Medicaid and food assistance cuts less severe. The third was that deficit hawks were promised that the Senate would make the bill less expensive. And the fourth was that they were all promised another bite at the apple to make changes after the Senate passed its version.

Well, they did get to have a nice Memorial Day recess, but none of the rest happened. The Senate made the cuts more severe even as they made the overall cost more expensive. And then the House was forced to pass the Senate bill without any changes. All of their work on the bill was thrown in the dumpster.

Something similar happened to Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2010 when they were forced to pass the Senate version of the Affordable Care Act. In that case, the House Democrats swallowed hard and passed a bill that was inferior to their own on both policy and politics, and wound up being slaughtered in the midterm elections later in the year.

Let me show you a chart from a piece at G. Eliot Morris’s Strength in Numbers blog:

The Affordable Care Act was three points underwater when it passed. The OBBB is 23 points under water. The only bill more unpopular at the time of consideration in the last 35 years is Trump’s original tax cut bill from 2017. The OBBB not only makes those cuts permanent, it attacks elements of President Biden’s popular Infrastructure and COVID-19 relief bills. The OBBB is a staggering political risk for the Republicans in a midterm year, and they know it. There’s a reason it barely passed the House and needed vice-president J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote to pass the Senate. It makes one wonder why any Republicans are celebrating the bill’s passage.

The answer is that they love tax cuts for the rich more than their own jobs.

But there’s a warning in that chart, too. You’ll notice that the Republicans are on the wrong side of almost everything. Two of the most popular bills of the last 35 years are the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban. The GOP has weakened the first and repealed the second. They generally oppose raising the minimum wage. They, along with the Supreme Court, have been savaging the Clean Air Act. Mitch McConnell made a career of opposing campaign finance reform. They’re currently weakening the Dodd-Frank reforms. People support gay marriage and the Affordable Care Act, and they absolutely hated George W. Bush’s TARP bill. Yet, despite all this, the Republicans control all three branches of government.

How is this possible? That’s a subject for a different post. Maybe nothing matters.

But, at least in the short term, we can see a pretty solid correlation between passing unpopular legislation and getting punished for it immediately afterwards. I’m not sure how to fully explain the lack of instinct for self-preservation involved here. I saw it once before with the Republicans in the lead-up to the 2006 midterms when their refusal to break with the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of Iraq doomed dozens of them. After those midterms, David Brooks observed:

On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along…

They are like people quietly marching to their doom.

But foreign policy is the natural province of the executive branch, and congressional deference was more understandable in that case.

Whatever the explanation, the Republicans produced a truly horrible bill from literally every perspective, except that of really rich people getting tax breaks. The House hated their own bill and hate the Senate bill infinitely more. The Senate created a bill solely on what could pass, and that was not genuinely and enthusiastically embraced by any of their members. I believe if Trump fully understood what is in the bill, he would not be happy either, although he’s obviously happy about funding his police state. From a strictly political point of view, the Democrats could be ecstatic that this bill passed. But then there are the catastrophic merits and the fact that in the long term the Republicans never seem to pay a price for doing unpopular things.

Finally, in order for the GOP to pay a price even in the near term, we have to have free and fair elections. The Trump administration has no intention of letting that happen and now they have hundreds of billions of dollars to fund their goon squads.

This bill could make the fascist regime too powerful to resist. And that’s the main reason the fight against it was so important. The odds were never in our favor, but there was no excuse for not waging the fight to the very end without cynicism or resignation.

Now the fight gets harder and the stakes get bigger.