Ep 13: The Big Beautiful Bill - Revisted

Join me as I revisit the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and unpack what changed, what stayed the same, and who really benefits. From devastating Medicaid cuts to massive tax breaks for the wealthy, this episode breaks down the promises Republicans made—and the realities Americans now face. We’ll explore how Trump’s influence shaped the bill, silenced opposition, and turned political theater into policy. Whether you’re following politics closely or just trying to understand what’s happening, this episode sheds light on the stakes for us all. 

Transcript

Raheel Khan: 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of Khannecting the Dots. It's been another week in Trump's America, and I wanna start today by talking about something that perfectly captures where we are as a country. Because what I'm about to describe isn't just about any single issue. It's about how completely one man now controls our political system. Let's start first with Stephen Colbert. Just weeks ago, CBS and Paramount settled Trump's lawsuit over that 60 minutes interview with Kamala Harris, a lawsuit most legal experts called frivolous. Then days after Colbert criticized the settlement as a bribe. They canceled the Late Show. Think about what just happened there. A major media corporation, not a government agency, not a political party, but a private company. Made a business decision to silence a prominent Trump critic. They claim it was financial, but the timing tells a different story. Particularly since Colbert show is still the most watched late night show, a network tv. This pattern of corporate self-censorship extends to government institutions. In the same week, Republicans voted on Trump's rescission bill. He had demanded the claw back$9.3 billion in previously approved foreign aid funding and funding for NPR and PBS. Republican Senators went through their usual theater expressing concerns and appearing deliberate and methodical, but ultimately bowed to Trump's will. No real debate. No substantive pushback, just compliance. But the most revealing example came with the Epstein files. For months, conservative influencers and Republican lawmakers have been demanding transparency,"Release the Epstein files", they shouted."The American people deserve the truth". The idea of a special prosecutor was even floated. Seeing the files had become a rallying cry across right wing media. But here's what makes this story so revealing. When Republicans had the chance to actually vote for transparency, with real opportunities in the house, every single Republican voted it down. Not some of them, all of them. This wasn't because some new damaging information about Trump had emerged. The Wall Street Journal's bombshell story about that salacious birthday card. Trump allegedly sent Epstein. You know, the one with the outline of a naked woman and the line"may every day be another wonderful secret" that didn't come out until July 17th. Two days after Republicans killed the transparency efforts, Republicans weren't protecting Trump because any new information even surfaced. Why? Because they already knew enough to be worried. Back in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein"likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side". Three years later, he told Howard Stern about walking into dressing rooms at his pageants."You know, they're standing there with no clothes and you see these incredible looking woman, and so I sort of get away with things like that." Add the Access Hollywood tapes, the Miss Teen USA allegations. Elon Musk's June accusation that Trump was"in the Epstein files" and Trump's well-documented friendship with Epstein and the picture becomes clear. Republicans didn't need to wait for a smoking gun. They had enough evidence, to know transparency was dangerous for Trump. So rather than let the truth emerge, they chose preemptive protection. That is a hallmark of autocracy, not just abandoning principles when they threaten the leader, but abandoning them in anticipation of threats that might emerge. But the most perfect example of this autocratic control; trumps one big, beautiful bill signed into law on July 4th, with all the pomp and circumstance Trump demanded. Packed with his legislative priorities and passed with barely any real opposition from the supposed co-equal branch of government. If you've listened to this show before you remember back in episode five, I broke down the house version of this bill and talked about its potential consequences for America. Now that it's officially law, I wanna take a look at it again. See what's changed. What stayed the same, how the opposition was easily sidelined, and how the GOP delivered for Trump, for their donors and for themselves. But not for the American people. Because what we witnessed wasn't just one of the greatest con jobs in legislative history, enriching Trump and his billionaire allies off the backs of the poor, but also, autocracy in action. Republicans performing just enough opposition to maintain the illusion of democratic debate while ensuring Trump got exactly what he wanted. First, let's start with the narrative that Trump and the Republicans have been pushing. Their sales pitch. This bill rescues the middle class. It makes taxes fair. It rewards work and stops government waste. In reality, most independent analysts say the same thing. This is Sheriff of Nottingham. Economics perfected. Take from the poor and give to the rich. Who actually gets the tax cuts. Just like in the house version, the final bill gives most of its tax benefits to the wealthiest Americans. People who already pay less than their fair share thanks to loopholes, working families can't use. The bottom 20% of earners. They'll get, on average,$120 back per year. The middle of 20%, about$1,100 per year. The top 1% about$75,000 per year. And the top 0.1%, a staggering$275,000 per year. Two thirds of all tax cuts go to the richest. 20% of Americans. The top 1% alone get more than the bottom, 80% combined. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates, the final bill will add$3.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. That's even after trillion dollars in safety net cuts. How are supposed fiscal conservatives explaining this massive debt increase? They declared that extending the 2017 tax cuts doesn't count as new spending because those cuts are already current policy. It's like saying your Netflix subscription doesn't cost anything because you've had it for years. Remember that state and local tax deduction that helps wealthy Blue State residents? Well, the house version had raised it from 10,000 to$20,000 a year. The final bill?$40,000 a year for the next five years. This mainly benefits families that make somewhere between$100,000 to$500,000 a year. About one third of American families. So again, this is about keeping affluent, voters happy, those who benefit the most from these salt deductions. Then there's healthcare. The Medicaid cuts got even worse. It's estimated to lose a trillion dollars. As a result, the CBO now projects up to 12 million people could lose health insurance. Nearly a million more than the original house estimate. Republicans added a$50 billion"rural hospitalization fund", which they say will help. But will it really? That's like if I took away your last dollar, then just gave you back 5 cents and told you to survive off of that. Here are some other key provisions that made it through: work requirements for Medicaid that increase medical debt, not employment. Snap cuts completely removing 3.2 million people off of food assistance and reducing benefits from millions more. The elimination of the$200 tax on gun silencers. No taxes on tips, which still won't benefit. 40% of tipped workers and experts say is rife for abuse by the wealthy. Earlier phase out of tax credits for wind and solar power, which experts predict will increase household energy costs. And billions for Trump's punitive mass deportation plans. There are a few things they did strip out: the AI moratorium, preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence. Proposed sales of public lands. And the tax on wind and solar projects that use Chinese components. But notice the pattern. The corporate giveaways and tax cuts for the rich stayed. The policies that hurt working families stayed. Things that weren't critical for Trump's agenda are the only things to get removed. And here's something that got very little attention. That I talked about in the last episode. This new law makes it much harder for courts to enforce orders against the government. If the administration violates a court ruling. Judges can't hold them in contempt unless plaintiffs posted massive bonds upfront. Legal experts, warn this could make court orders"unenforceable" and turn judicial rulings into"advisory opinion". So the bill doesn't just rob from the poor and give to the rich. It also weakens the courts, a key guardrail against autocracy. So how are Republicans justifying all this. by rewriting reality. Republicans claim this bill works because: tax relief fuels growth and"lifts all boats" work requirements ensure only"deserving people get benefit". Trillion dollar deficits demand tough choices. But when you look at the evidence, every single one of their argument crumbles. While the Senate was debating the Bill. House speaker, Mike Johnson went on a media blitz. He was on any Sunday show he could find attacking the CBO for daring to analyze the bill's actual costs. On Fox News Johnson claimed the CBO always gets it wrong and was off.$1 trillion on the 2017 tax cuts. Here's the problem. As a fact checker from the Washington Post noted,"even the CBO couldn't predict the pandemic". Johnson is blaming the CBO for not foreseeing COVID-19. He even cited the study claiming 84% of CBO employees are devoted donors to Elizabeth Warren. Bernie Sanders, and other democrats. The study was from a private conservative group, not a government agency, and fact checkers have debunked similar claims. His other argument."We're not cutting Medicaid in this package. There's a lot of misinformation out there, about this." Like I said earlier, the CBO estimates the bill cuts 1 trillion from Medicaid and will cause up to 12 million people to lose health coverage. Johnson's response. On CNN, he said,"you're talking about 4.8 million able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. That is called fraud, they're cheating the system." Yeah, but that 4.8 million number. Nobody really knows where it came from. And the Kaiser Family Foundation found that most Medicaid recipients subject to proposed work requirements are in fact already employed. And we know what happens with work requirements. In Arkansas, 18,000 people lost coverage in nine months. Not because they weren't working, but because the paperwork was impossible to navigate. Health Secretary, RFK Junior offered this great explanation on Fox Business."First of all, there's no cuts on Medicaid. There is a diminishment of the growth rate of Medicaid, which is bankrupting our country". Then he added"the national debt is also determinant- social determinant- of health. If we're leaving our kids with these giant debts, they can't afford healthcare. They can't afford good food". So let me get this straight. Cutting. Medicaid helps health outcomes because debt is unhealthy? From a bill that adds$3.3 trillion to the national deficit? And of course, who can forget the president? He went around repeatedly claiming that without this bill, Americans would face a whopping 68% tax increase. factcheck.org found this claim has no basis in reality, if the 2017 tax cuts expired, taxes would rise about 10.7%, nowhere near the 68% he was claiming. The Tax Policy Center estimated an even smaller increase, around 7.5%. To be fair, both numbers are still a lot, but nothing like the crazy numbers Trump was insisting on. Notice a pattern here. Every Republican talking point followed the same script. Attack the numbers even when they're accurate. Redefine words. Cuts become growth reductions. Blame someone else. CBO, media, Democrats. Create statistics when real ones don't work. This messaging strategy worked just well enough to get the bill passed while keeping their base in line. Here's the other disturbing part of this whole charade though. How completely Republicans have fallen in line. This was supposedly the party of fiscal conservatives, claiming to represent the working class, but their no votes aren't real opposition. They're calculated to protect seats while ensuring Trump gets what he wants. As John Stewart said on, his July 7th episode,"it should have been clear that this bill, like everything else was gonna pass, on the day they said it was gonna pass. That the nos for the bill were for show." The arguments put forward were"scripted to allow certain senators plausible deniability without putting any part of that agenda actually at risk. As usual, he's not wrong. Let's look at some of the performances. After the house passed its version back in May. Marjorie Taylor Green posted on X."Full transparency. I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 that strip states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years. I am adamantly opposed to this, and it is a violation of state rights that I would've voted no if I'd known this was in there". So grand of her to make a stand after voting Yes on a bill She didn't even read. She made sure Trump's agenda sailed through Congress and after the fact tried to look independent and principled. In the Senate, members like Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley spent months criticizing the bill saying it was being rushed, or that the Medicaid cuts were too severe. Josh Hawley even wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times back in May, arguing against Medicaid cuts. Amazingly, they both voted for the bill without major concessions. Then there's Senator Tom Tillis, perhaps the lone voice in real opposition to this bill. He decided not to run for a third term after Trump said he would primary him in the next election. Not your usual renegade, he actually spoke the truth about the healthcare cuts."I think the people in the White House, the amateurs advising the president, are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise". Of all the cop outs though, the most egregious was Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski. At the last minute, she won concessions for Alaska and then had the gall to tell NBC news."Do I like this bill? No. But I tried to take care of Alaska's interest, but I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill". She then stated that she hoped the house would reject the Senate version because"we're not there yet" and the bill"needs more work". This is the same woman who said back in April that many Republicans were afraid of tough negotiations because of fear of retaliation from the president. Now she was hoping somebody else would do her job for her. When the bill made it back to the house, the Atlantics, Russel Berman stated it best."Republicans from both ends of the party mounted seemingly firm stands against the proposal, only to fold under pressure from the President and GOP leaders. In a series of votes throughout the night, dissenters turned to supporters without winning any changes to the bill". Think about the math for a second. In the Senate, republicans have 53 seats. The bill passed 51/50, with exactly three Republicans voting no Collins, Paul, and Tillis. Precisely the number they could afford to lose while still passing the bill with Vance's tiebreaker. In the house with a razor thin majority, exactly two Republicans voted no Massey and Fitzpatrick. Just under the number that would've killed the bill. This is how for the first time in recent history, every major provision in the bill of this scale matched the rhetorical priorities of the president and dissent even among those who knew better, barely registered above background noise. Want more proof? Look at the recent rescission bill. Fresh from celebrating their victory on the big, beautiful Bill Republicans immediately went to work on Trump's next demand. Slashing foreign aid and completely defunding NPR and PBS. These weren't popular priorities. Defunding public broadcasting has been a Republican wishlist item for decades, but rank and file members never had the stomach for it. Trump made it personal. He hates NPR and PBS for their coverage. Suddenly Republicans found their courage. The same with foreign aid cuts, classic America first isolationism that Trump demanded. When it came time to vote. There were no meaningful debates, no consideration of how aid cuts affect civilians or how losing public media hurts, particularly, rural communities. Lawmakers who spent careers defending international engagement and educational programming offered only token objections, then fell in line. The pattern was identical to the big, beautiful bill perform independence, deliver compliance. So where does all of this leave us? Well, when it comes to the big, beautiful bill we've just witnessed, one of the greatest legislative heists in American history. This isn't just a bad bill, it's a monument to everything wrong with American politics. The corruption of money, the perversion of democracy, and the complete abandonment of any pretense that government should serve working people. The one big, beautiful bill is neither big nor beautiful. It's small and ugly. A small vision of an America where might makes right and money trumps humanity. This bill will cause real suffering for real people. Children will go hungry, families will lose healthcare. Seniors will struggle to afford medications. And all of this suffering has a purpose to pay for tax cuts for people who already have more money than they can spend in their lifetimes. It's not just bad policy, it's immoral policy. It's sheriff of Nottingham Economics taken to its logical extreme. And what have we learned about the current Republican Party through this whole ordeal? That their principles are for sale or completely non-existent. Their claims of fiscal responsibility are a joke. They make talking points that are increasingly disconnected from reality. And that the Republican party is now completely a cult of personality, where Trump's wishes matter more than any stated principle or campaign promise. But this isn't just about one bad bill. This is about what happens when a democracy stops functioning as a democracy, when opposition becomes performance art. When facts become optional. When loyalty to one person matters more than loyalty to the country. What can we do about this? Even though the bill is now law, this fight isn't over. There are two key opportunities ahead. Many of the worst cuts don't take effect until after 2026 and are extended out over 10 years. And the individual tax cuts expire in 2028. None of this has to be permanent. Major reversals are unlikely while Trump holds veto power, but those windows give us chances to change course. Future congresses can restore what's been cut. Until then. Support organizations, helping people navigate reduced benefits or those that are mounting legal challenges to the worst provisions. Volunteer for candidates who believe government should serve working people, not billionaires. And most importantly, vote. Vote in every general, primary, and special election you're eligible for. Whether it's for local, state, or federal positions. The people breaking our democracy are counting on us to give up. Don't give them that victory. Stay engaged because the people we elect determine whether we have a government that serves us or exploits us. Thanks for listening to Khannecting the Dots. If you found this episode informative, please share with someone who might benefit from hearing it. Consider subscribing wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review. Until next time, stay curious, stay critical, and stay connected.