May 22, 2022

If passed, this measure will put Trump’s wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”

Three judges are currently considering whether the administration is in contempt of court over its apparent disregard for court orders over its rendition of undocumented immigrants to third countries.

But the center of the bill is indeed related to money: it is the $3.8 trillion extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations. Yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Americans in the lowest tenth of earners will lose money under the measure while people in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.

Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal healthcare and food assistance programs to partially offset the costs of the tax cuts. Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without healthcare coverage. Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be “the biggest cut in the program’s history,” Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.

Yesterday the CBO reported that the measure will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and noted that when a budget adds too much to the federal deficit, it triggers cuts to Medicare (not a typo) under the Pay-As-You-Go law. The CBO explains that those cuts are limited by law to 4% but would still total about $490 billion from 2027 through 2034. Heather Cox Richardson

Rep. Melanie Stansbury 

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Breaking

Republicans rejected every single one of the more than 500 Democratic amendments we offered on Reconciliation— but then dropped a huge “manager’s amendment” at the last moment they’ve been negotiating all day behind closed doors. Here’s what’s in their big compromise (it’s a real doozy):

-Ups the start date for Medicaid repeals to start December 2026 (increasing suffering by two years)

-Increases healthcare premiums

(for hundreds of thousands of MORE people likely to lose healthcare)

-Zeros out taxes for the transfer of silencers on guns (why!?!?)

-Extends a permitting pay-to-play scheme to natural gas pipelines (another oil and gas giveaway)

-Repeals clean energy incentives and expedites nuclear energy

-And renames accounts for newborns to “Trump” accounts (because there’s nothing weird about that)…

All re