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- [00:00]
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- [01:03]
Host
We're live. We have just finished a extensive speech from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. And then we just saw Speaker Mike Johnson give a less extensive speech in favor of passage of Trump's big, beautiful bill, the bbb, whatever you want to call it. And now we are watching as the House is going to take a vote to pass this thing, which we assume will pass, and then it'll go to the President's desk. I'm joined by Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, Andrew Egger, both esteemed newsletter writers for the Bulwark. Sarah, you're the boss. Let us get. Let's get your take on where we stand right now.
- [01:41]
Sarah Longwell
You know, is it bad if I start this off by saying Congress is so annoying? No, that's not good analysis. Right. Just to say the American House of Representatives is ridiculous. First of all, listening to Mike Johnson. So I listened to much. Mike Johnson's was much shorter. So I listened to all of it. Unlike Hakeem Jeffries, who I think is getting more marks for length and the fortitude to sort of stand there, which is becoming a bit of what Democrats have to do when they have no actual power. They are just throwing their bodies in front of the podium for extended periods of time as sort of the. The only option of opposition to this bill since it looks like it does have the votes to pass. I did want to sort of laugh at Mike Johnson's criticism of how everybody had been waiting for so long, and that was Hakeem Jeffrey's fault because Hakeem started at like, I don't know, 4:45 or something this morning.
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Host
Yeah.
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Sarah Longwell
But yesterday it was the Republicans people going back and forth. They're having people, you know, leave and come back and, and the reason was they didn't have the votes or they didn't have the people, it was unclear. But we basically spent yesterday watching a bunch of people who were hard nose on this bill get strong armed into becoming yeses. And so, you know, the way that, you know, because performative, being performative is sort of all the Democrats have. I give Hakeem Jeffries the credit for, you know, putting his body in front of things, going as long as he could, making a strong statement. But there's something, there's just something so impotent about it all that, that like, it sucks to sit and watch Mike Johnson get to gloat. And like all Democrats have to hold on to is the like, fortitude of Hakeem Jeffries ability to stand for a long period of time and talk.
- [03:40]
Host
Yeah. Well, to the victor go the spoils. Right. You win the House, you get the power.
- [03:45]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Mike Johnson is deeply insufferable and just like told so many lies during that thing. I mean, I know that we have men and women of deep faith and who are very committed to God at the Bulwark, but like, did we need all that right now for this bill? Like, this is ordained by God, this idiotic bill that none of them could pass, that we've got to pretend like Donald Trump is some devout guy. I thought it was interesting that he was taking a talking about communism while Trump has just been on the phone with Putin, who he's basically been taking orders from. We're the hottest country in the world. Is he mean temperature? It is very hot.
- [04:24]
Host
Yeah, it's very hot here. I would say DC's been pretty rough. My favorite was the police line where he's like, we have to protect the people, stand by the people who protect us. Like, you're sitting in the chamber that was ransacked and you can't have, you can't bring in yourself to put up a plaque honoring the cops from who protected you on January 6th.
- [04:40]
Sarah Longwell
But, and I do think Democrats were booing him at that point. And he, I will say, man, he is a slippery guy. I was just sitting there watching him thinking about how like he's better at this than Kevin McCarthy.
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Host
Oh, yeah.
- [04:53]
Sarah Longwell
Like, and he's still, he's got the Kevin McCarthy, like real smarm, but he does this real like, laughing at the Democrats type thing. This kind of smile. Yeah. Not of like, yeah, look how. Look how insignificant these guys are. That is like a dagger. And, you know, you really have to know how much he's lying while he's up there to see how disingenuous and gross it all is. But that takes a high level of understanding of what's actually in the bill and what the bill's actually going to do.
- [05:24]
Host
Yeah, Andrew, my favorite part was he spends like 15 minutes being like, the Democrats are the Antichrist. They hate cops. They don't believe in, you know, the working people. They've abandoned them. And he's like, but on this ceremony, on this anniversary of July 4th, let's all come together and believe in our friendship with each other. It's like, you know, you just stuck the knife into them for a good 10 minutes. Anyways, putting aside Mike Johnson, what do you think of. What do you think of how he got to this moment?
- [05:51]
Jonathan Cohn
Well, let me say one more thing about Mike Johnson. Just. Just to agree with, concur with that point. It's almost like a kind of code switching, right. Where he. He's just so comfortable, and he slips effortlessly back and forth between, like, these various modes of Republican communication of, like. Yeah, you know, we might have a lot of, like, commun. Communist, anarchist, antifa sympathizers over on the other side of the aisle, but at the same time, we're not so different, you and I. We all love America. And it's like. It's completely like, in the same sentence almost. He can. He can do both things. Yeah. I mean, the one other thing that. That was so striking to the point about. Oh, man, Democrats really made us wait a long time to pass this bill. This bill has been rammed through the House of Representatives this time around. I mean, it had to be in order to keep it from going back to the Senate.
- [06:32]
Sarah Longwell
But.
- [06:32]
Jonathan Cohn
But that was what the whole point was of yesterday, is that the House had a bunch of fights on this before they finally ground their way to a compromise. Then it went over to the Senate. The Senate completely remade the bill, both for political reasons, to get the votes of various senators, and for procedural reasons. The parliamentarian ruling a bunch of things out of bounds and them having to scrounge up, you know, new provisions. I mean, it's a very different bill than what the House voted on before. But it's not like this thing's heading to a conference committee. They're just approving the Senate version of the bill. They're concurring with that which is without any other changes. And so what we saw yesterday was literally just a lengthy like bluff calling power game where there were a lot of Republicans who had major problems with, with the bill as it came back and not all in one block either. You had a lot of like kind of Freedom Caucus guys who didn't think it, it had enough sort of spending slashing conservative priorities. You had a lot of more moderate Republican types, Main Street Caucus guys who were really unsettled about the, the extensively expanded Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of the bill. And all these people were kind of unhappy about it. It came over. People as late as last night were saying, we can't vote on this. You guys need to, we kind of need to go back to the drawing board, slow your roll a little bit. But Speaker Johnson and Donald Trump called their bluff. They basically said, sucks to suck. You don't get to make any more changes to this. We're going to open this vote and then we're going to hold it open until enough of you blink that we get a majority and then we're going to pass it. And that's what we saw happen.
- [08:01]
Host
Cohen, I'm going to get to you in one second. But Sarah, I want to bring you on this one because, you know, you and JVL were talking about it today and then Andrew wrote about today just the sort of inevitability of the cave of some of these Republicans. I mean, so many of them had drawn like, you know, not little lines in the sand, but very clear. We were not going to take $500 billion in Medicaid cuts. I will not vote in passage of the Senate version of this bill. There has to be more deficit reduction. Mike Johnson had said you could throw me out as speaker if we don't get more deficit reduction in this bill. And then in fact, he turned around and he passed the Senate one, which was worse on that. What I guess I should just ask what is one to make of the profound lack of, you know, principle here and the willingness just to sort of have the one overriding principle being, I guess, helping Trump or you know, sticking it to the Dems.
- [08:55]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. What do we call it? Is it Racco? Republicans always checking out, Dave? Yeah, I think that's what we were talking about on this, on the secret pod this morning. Yeah, look, Trump told him to get, get it done and they did. I gotta say, just hardest hit Lisa Murkowski who said, well, you know, guys, the House is going to fix this. Yes, yes, I voted to punt But I'm sure they will, they will take what my, my concerns and they will make a better bill out of it. I, I, I don't. And, and maybe con can tell us if this bill changed at all in any real or meaningful way. Yeah, right. No, that, so Lisa, I don't know if you know this, but you got played. And I, yeah, I mean, look, Trump. So one of the things we were doing over here in our shop is we were just collecting a bunch of clips and of all these guys, they're all on tape a million bajillion times talking about the debt ceiling, talking about the debt, talking about how much it saddles the next generation with in terms of debt. And I think it was at the time, you know, I saw one by Jody Ernst where It was like 45,000 per grandchild that was going to end up now this bill, it's about 330,000 per grandchildren. And so it is, it is just an, it's an absence of principle, but it is a, and it is a real showing of how much Trump can just make them all fall in line.
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Host
And they, but why is it just simple? Is it as simple as that? I'm saying as simple as if we don't fall in line, we're going to lose and we don't want to lose. I mean, I guess that's it, right?
- [10:36]
Sarah Longwell
You know, Tim and I were talking about this on, on tnl and I think this is probably as close to a good explanation as you can get, which is there's like a lunch table theory of politics, right? Which is just, it's peer pressure. Like they're like you're going to be the one holdout. It's not just that they'd get primaried, it's that these guys think that this is the only thing they're going to do. They've got to get it done. Nobody wants taxes to go up and to expire and so they feel the pressure of that. They don't want to give the Dems a win. I guess they don't want to give Elon a win. And so they just decided to do it even though they all hate it.
- [11:14]
Host
Cohen, let's talk a bit about the stuff in the bill, but I want to actually talk about what I've heard from strategists, which is like, well, it might not be that big a deal for Republicans right now because they've put all the sort of hard hitting stuff, the vegetables, if you want to say, past the midterms and the benefits are going to Come more quickly. And certainly people will be grateful that they don't see their taxes going up. How true is that? That they stack the benefits and push back the costs?
- [11:43]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, I mean, I heard that too. I'm skeptical. We'll see for a couple of reasons. One is that some of these cuts are going to hit soon. The cuts to the Affordable Care act are going to affect the next plan year, which is people are going to start getting their rate notices in September, October, and they're going to see that. You're going to see states and healthcare systems already starting to make plans. There was a story this morning about a clinic in Nebraska closing. Now, did that clinic in Nebraska close because this bill was going to pass? No, but I think that speaks to something else, which I don't know.
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Host
The article write up said that they anticipated the Medicaid cuts for that.
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Jonathan Cohn
Did they see?
- [12:30]
Andrew Egger
I didn't even see that. Oh, well, there you go. The news is ahead of where I even think it is. You are going to see that a lot. Very similar. You're going to see something very similar in when factories are starting to close that were built up to take advantage of the subsidies for clean energy that are getting yanked back. States are going to make budget decisions early and pull back on these things. I do think, obviously it depends a lot on. On how successful Democrats and other critics of this legislation can spotlight those stories and link them. But I do think they have two things going for them, which is especially in the health care space. People are primed to believe that Republicans have taken away health care to give tax cuts to the wealthy, which happens to be literally true in the case of this bill. So that's not a hard case to make. And then secondly, they own a whole lot of reality right now, right? I mean, inflation goes up and, you know, health care prices go up, you name it, that something in this bill touches it. And Democrats are going to be able to make the argument that, hey, here's this bill, you know, they made these changes. Now this is happening. You know, now your health care is getting more expensive.
- [13:55]
Host
Well, that's the case. Yeah. That's the case for any party in power. Right. It's like you see all the time, which is you get blamed for the stuff that happens on your watch, whether you deserve it or not. The one thing Andrew, I want to talk about that's in the bill that does seem likely to happen really quickly and I don't really know how it plays out. Sarah, I'm kind of curious for your take too, because Republicans are super excited about this is the just sheer amount of money that's going to ice, immigration authorities, deportations. We thought it's been bad up until this point. My suspicion is that it's just going to get amplified by this and not much money for, like, immigration lawyers. We're talking about, like, militarized borders, detention centers, that type of stuff. I can imagine the next six months that this goes into hyperdrive. And I just don't know, honestly, how it plays politically.
- [14:40]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, and you say kind of like mass deportation. Right? But. But it's. The money in this bill is not even necessarily directed toward deportation. What we're seeing is more of like a mass detention sort of center. We're sort of seeing the White House pivot on, away from, or at least partially away from this promise, you know, to expeditiously get lots of people back to their countries of origin, because that's been snarled in the courts in all kinds of ways. And instead to do this new thing where they're standing up, you know, have hundreds of tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars directed toward ICE and federal immigration enforcement to stand up new detention centers, to hire new agents, to basically just, you know, keep people locked up here, even if they can't get them out of the country. And that's, you know, that's a shift. It was not. I don't think it was part of their original plan originally. They were kind of hoping to be able to sort of short circuit the. The ordinary immigration court process, which was a lot of the. The early moves they made, which got kind of stymied and bottled up in the courts. And those are all still ongoing fights. But in the meantime, I think we're seeing sort of a shift of emphasis here where, like, if, you know, to whatever extent they are able to get away with getting around the immigration court system, to whatever extent the Supreme Court will let them do that, they'll keep doing that. But in the meantime, tons and tons of new. Of new money for ICE agents, tons and tons of new money for detention, and like you mentioned, only a very small amount of money to solve what a lot of people consider to be sort of the real bottleneck here, which is not enough immigration judges to process these people, to allow them to have due process and. And then make these sorts of judgments.
- [16:18]
Host
Sarah, I'm going to come to you very quickly. Yes, sir. I'm going to come to you quickly. Just want to give people watching state of play here. You see two nay votes. That's Tom Matzi and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania on the Republican side, all Democrats but one have voted nay. On the Democratic side, I guess there's just one person waiting. People are cheering pretty frantically right there. I wonder if that's because they hit the target. It looks like they have. According to news reports, they have hit the target, even though it's not reflected on the count there. But the bill is passed. Sarah, talk about the immigration component and then just sort of the legacy of this bill passing.
- [16:53]
Sarah Longwell
I mean, Andrew did it. Andrew. Andrew did it. He's, he's right. It's, it's, it's all about. We're going to. So I think, and I had these numbers yesterday in front of me. I don't have them right now, but I'm pretty sure it's about. The funding for ICE previously was about 3.6 billion. It is now going, I believe, to either 45 or 46 billion. And so I tried to do the math on that live yesterday. It didn't work then. It's not going to work now. But it's an enormous increase in what, what we're going to put into detaining people. And this is on top of, you know, us shuttling people to foreign countries. And, you know, we just got the information last night about the conditions that Albero Garcia was being detained in, which sounded horrific and God awful, and also about sort of the, the way in which they are putting on a show for foreign governments, right. Where like, they take them to one place when, you know, members of Congress or something are visiting. And then when the cameras aren't there, they're just beating these guys with sticks left and right. So I, I am. And, and, but it's interesting because the, the immigration part was really the carrot, like, for us, I think, you know, people are, I don't. The American people, I know this from focus groups, do not realize, like, the particulars of how much money is going to the wall. I mean, isn't the wall built? I could have sworn they kept telling us the wall was built.
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Host
They told us it was.
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Sarah Longwell
Well, they got to build it again. I guess they got to make it stronger and bigger, more beautiful. So. But the American people, like, they're not asking for more detention centers. They're not asking for more ice. I do think they are asking for deportations of criminals. They are asking for a closed border. I think those are true. But there's a lot in this bill that is a real stretch on what the American people have asked for. Also, this is where Mike Johnson, like, the hubris of the way he's talking about the bill with, you know, the American people have been telling us to get this done. Now, there is not a poll that shows that this thing is popular and the more people are learning about it, the less popular it's getting all the time.
- [19:04]
Host
But they, but didn't you think the JD Vance tweet yesterday was kind of telling where he said everything else is kind of minutia?
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Sarah Longwell
No, I said it's immaterial.
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Host
Immaterial. Sorry.
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Sarah Longwell
The only thing that matters to J.D. vance and what he was trying to convey to voters is like, we care about this ICE money, we care about the immigration money. Everything else is immaterial. But of course, now is 45, 46 billion a lot of money for ice. It sure is. I believe it makes them like one of the largest NOW forces. Andrew, did I read this in your newsletter today?
- [19:34]
Host
Is the Bremmer tweet, If they have their, their money is almost bigger than a bunch of militaries.
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Sarah Longwell
Yeah, it's like ICE is now going to be bigger than a lot of other countries. Militaries, which I actually don't think Americans were voting for. But the, the. So both the bill is unpopular and there's a whole, you know, this idea. So one of the things Johnson was doing, and this is what I meant before about saying you have to know a lot about this bill to see how much he's lying. But he kept saying like, we are giving working class Americans the tax relief they need. Well, not really. I mean, the, the, the tax benefits, it's an extension, by the way. They're just like going to keep them going. But for working class families, it's quite nominal. And again, love a tax cut here, assuming you're not $37 trillion in debt and it's costing you more to service the interest on the debt than it is to basically like do any kind of programs for the people in your country. That's an irresponsible move. It is not fiscally responsible. You will never beat the fiscal hawk out of me that believes that we should have debt and deficit reduction and that that means you can't give people enormous tax cuts. I like tax cuts. I want businesses not to have to pay exorbitant taxes. But like the, the tax cut that Trump did was enormous. It is mostly structured for the top earners in the country. And I mean, walking that back slightly when you are this much in debt is just like a responsible thing to do. It's what a responsible country does.
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Host
Cohen, why don't you Use your wonkiness to unpack, if you can remember it, all the mistrusts or misdirections of Johnson's speech with respect to this bill.
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Andrew Egger
Yeah, so, I mean, I, the one that sort of jumped out at me that Sarah was just talking about was, you know, working, you know, this is good for working class Americans and we're strengthening the safety net, which are actually related. There's a lot of working class Americans who rely on the safety net. They rely on the Affordable Care act to get health insurance. If they don't directly rely on Medicaid, they have family who do sometimes for long term care, things like that. And they're going to see the effects of that again for the sake of a nominal tax cut. This idea that I think the fact they have constantly tried to sell this bill as somehow strengthening Medicaid and strengthening food stamps and protecting them, I think is a sign of the political weakness here. You can be in favor of this bill, you can be against this, this bill. You know, you can believe government needs to be a lot smaller. We're better off with the tax cuts. Great. But they're not defending it that way. Right. What they are defending it as we're actually making these safety net programs stronger. And there's just not a universe where that's true. You can't take $1.3 trillion out of all these programs and not leave millions of people either without access to healthcare, struggling to pay for their food bills. They know that's unpopular. That's why they keep denying it. And I think, you know, the question going forward is how long can they keep denying it? What point does the reality intervene with that and can they be held accountable for it?
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Host
And just on the Medicaid front, I mean, just quickly, if you can just unpack what. Because that's such a huge component of this and you have all these people insisting, well, you know, we're not really going to take benefits away. You had these videos of Trump resurfacing, saying, we're not going to touch Medicaid. You know, all these people like don bacon say 500 billion Medicaid cuts is my red line. Just what is going to happen to this program in the next three years?
- [23:13]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. So I mean, they phase in the Medicaid cuts, do phase in over time. And of course, by design, there is not one giant cut, it's several smaller cuts that are hard to explain, which I think is part of the political genius of this. You can't glom onto any one bit and say this is what they're doing because it's only one small part and it takes 10 minutes to explain each one. But you have, they sort of fall into some buckets, right? I mean, you have these work requirements which say that if you're an able bodied person and you're on and you don't show that you've sort of been working or looking for work or you have a disability, then you don't get Medicaid. There's a second set of changes that involve rearranging some of the financing that states use to get money from the federal government that works out to less money coming into the states. And there's a third set of changes that just change all kinds and make all kinds of tweaks to the enrollment procedure for getting on the program. And any one of these, you can debate them. And some of them sound actually when you, I think, and Sarah can back me up on this, the work requirement piece is the one that I think does poll well. People say, yeah, that sounds right to me. But we know from reality that what these really are is their paperwork requirements. You throw up a ton of obstacles in front of people. You say you have to go through this hoop, that hoop, that hoop, file this paper, that paper, that paper, the systems get messed up. You're dealing with people who are doing seasonal work sometimes don't have great access to technology and they just end up falling off.
- [24:43]
Jonathan Cohn
And they know that.
- [24:43]
Andrew Egger
I mean, this is by design. We know statistically that most people on Medicaid either work or have a disability or are a caregiver. And the numbers they have, there's no way to get the savings they want if you're not kicking people off who qualify for Medicaid. And they know that.
- [25:02]
Host
All right, let's just finalize this by going big picture here. And Sarah, you can start. And I'm just, I want to just kind of push on this point. We're six, we're six months in, more or less to Donald Trump. If you look at these six months here, you see the last member of Congress, Ralph Northam, coming in to vote. And that's why they held this open. I don't know why, where he was, whatever it passed, it was six months in Donald Trump. If you compare this to the first term, six months, I think objectively speaking, way more effective, way more stuff done. I'm not saying it's. I certainly don't agree with what he's done, but I think it's fair to say that the institutions are not holding as well as we would hope they had. And on top of that, he seems to be working Washington D.C. in a much more efficient and effective way than he had in term one. And you can see by the fact that they passed this and did not get Obamacare appeal done. So what are we to make of Trump? Is this an apex power moment? Is this just the state of the Republican Party? What do you make of Trump in this moment?
- [26:06]
Sarah Longwell
It's interesting question if it's an apex power moment. I remember really thinking his apex power moment actually was in 2022 when he wasn't. He had lost the election, but he had convinced people that he won. And he got to basically hand pick every primary challenge like the primary winner. And I wrote a piece about it at the time. The JVL would make a joke right now because I wrote it for the New York Times. But, but like his ability to basically clear, I mean, J.D. vance was not going to win that primary if Donald Trump hadn't intervened and endorsed him. And so I think part of what we're seeing is not just apex. It's like there's been an evolution of Donald Trump getting to, he's run out over time. Anybody who would oppose him, like, Liz Cheney's not there. John, that vote failed because John McCain did this. Number one, you had Principal John McCain, but Lisa Murkowski back then didn't take a kickback for her state like she did this time. Like the conditions have changed, the people have changed. Trump is sort of the same. It's like Trump is the same, but everything else has gotten weaker around him. And just the way we watched, you know, Republicans capitulate over time. Now we've watched lots of civil society capitulate over time, right? You got this just this week. You got 60 Minutes and Paramount, you know, caving to him, buying him off, giving him $16 million in a case they absolutely would have won if it went to court the same way ABC did. And so I just feel like it has become sort of people got exhausted, which is what happens with authoritarians, and they just start to roll over. And so he's just meeting with no resistance. And this is a perfect example of that. Where you watched members of Congress, they have an instinct of, here's what I believe, this bill doesn't fulfill it, I'm not going to vote for it. And then Trump calls. There's this horrible piece in the New York Times about Trump's charm offensive.
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Host
I saw that. Oh my God.
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Sarah Longwell
Where he brings everybody in and he's like, hey man, you want some Merch from the pro shop and like, oh, does your kid need a bunch of, I don't know, White House M and Ms? And like, just. And they went so cheap. They went so cheap. These guys. They went for like a couple polo shirts from the pro shop at Mar a Lago gave him the vote. And so I think that it's not Trump who's different. I think it's Republicans and people who are different.
- [28:29]
Host
Interesting. Andrew, do you agree? I mean, she is the boss, so I guess you kind of have.
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Jonathan Cohn
I agree, I agree.
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Host
Even on the merits.
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Jonathan Cohn
Not only because she's the boss. No, I mean, and the two things you just said are connected. Right. He has, he has handpicked a lot of these people. Now there's different people who were around before and it's, it's one of the grimmest things to contemplate is that the one institution that we are really counting on to maybe still show a little backbone here and they have from time to time so far is the Supreme Court, which he picked what, like a third of hand picked the last time around. And maybe we'll get more, more options this, in this term. The one. So, so yeah, I mean, I hope it's an apex power moment. I hope, because that would imply that it diminishes going forward. Yeah, I mean, it's true. This is the apex.
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Host
This is the worst that's going to get. Well, they're not doing another big bill.
- [29:13]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah. The one thing I wanted to say on, on the, the merit, like, like just, just to go all the way back for one second to the, the Jeffries and the Johnson speeches, because I think this is kind of like the, the, the center of sort of the culture war fight here is they are both making these appeals to basically like working class, lower middle class Americans, basically saying like two very different arguments to those people. And the Jefferies argument is Republicans buy everything that they want to do and everything in this are actively screwing you by making your finances worse by, and also giving all of these kickbacks to people who are making way more money than you. And that's a pretty effective argument. But there is another effective argument to these people that Republicans are relying on here, and this is the one that Johnson's making. He's not just totally making stuff up when he's saying, you know, we're, we're, we are making this bill with you in mind. He wants this bill to be emotionally powerful to them by basically saying, we have targeted this bill to protect you and to hurt people who do not work as hard as you, who are making less money than you, but who get to cheat the programs and get to skate and get to live as well as you do without working as hard as you do. And there's an emotional power to that argument as well. And Republicans, that's the kind of grievance that Trump eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And that is kind of the beating heart of the party right now. And I think the big question is just going to be to what extent does that message get beaten up by the actual facts of the matter, like what Jonathan was talking about before? Because people are, you know, people are not going to see that play out in their own lives for the reasons that you talk about. These are, these, these cuts are going to hit Trump voters, even some of the very Trump voters who might have been nodding along if they'd heard Johnson's speech today. But at the same time, we're all living in this total reality distortion world of everybody living online and, you know, like the narratives you see being real or to you than real.
- [31:09]
Host
Can I pick up on that? Because I think you hit on something that. Jonathan, you could take this and I think we could close that after this unless we have final thoughts. But to me, what was so profound about this whole exercise was not just how rushed it was and chaotic and how little, you know, institutional authority Congress showed or how little principles they showed. To me, what stood out about this was that they were actively afflicting and hurting their own constituencies. People on Medicaid, there are tons of Trump voters there. I mean, this is supposed to be the party that's going to be, you know, the new working class party. All this stuff about green energy and these factories were deliberately put by the Biden administration in red states. I mean, I remember that article in the Post of the Times. There's like this factory in Tulsa, a 700 million dollar factory that's just going to like stop. That's Tulsa. It's not like, you know, it's in Boston. And if you're willing to do that to your own people, that's. That to me, I just didn't quite comprehend and I don't know if I ever will, honestly. But con, am I overstating it? Is it or is that true?
- [32:20]
Andrew Egger
No, I think it is true. I mean, what's the solar capital manufacturing of America right now? Texas, where are the biggest battery factories for electric vehicles? Kentucky, South Carolina. Those are all going to go up in smoke clinics across all these rural communities are going to struggle and start pulling back services look, that's why they moved so quickly. That's why they were desperate to get this through without a public airing, why they were desperate to pass quickly before all of this could become apparent to the public. As Sarah said, I mean, the more people. The bill is unpopular and the more people learn about it, the less popular it gets. Now, I think what Andrew was just saying, I think is really so important because there's two narratives here. I can totally see the Republican narrative here taking over. And I was thinking back, and you guys probably all remember this, but I was thinking back to when the ACA passed. And you remember Boehner gave that speech, hell no, we're not going to pass. I remember a lot of Democrats kind of rolled their eyes at that speech. But looking back, that was kind of the galvanizing moment for a lot of the conservatives. And I don't know how much the speech itself mattered. But something Republicans knew that I think Democrats failed to appreciate after the ACA passed was that the fight to frame it keeps going and implementation matters. And I think how this gets discussed, how this gets chronicled in the coming months, coming years, is going to matter, not just politically in terms of who goes in power, but ultimately whether or not some of these features get modified, get changed. Because if you phase things in over time, that means there's time to dial them down or change them. And we've seen that happen before. You know, this is an ending, but it's not exactly an ending.
- [34:09]
Host
No, for sure. All right, Sarah, final thoughts.
- [34:12]
Sarah Longwell
So I just. On this, it's their voters. This is a new phenomenon that I think Republicans are still slightly adjusting to. They're like aware when they give lip service to working class voters that they have a new coalition that is made up of people who are much less wealthy than their coalition from 15 years ago. And I was looking at numbers and now again, I don't have them right in front of me, but I think I'm pretty close here. That back in 2009. Right. So in Obama's sort of first term, 26 of the poorest or the lowest income districts were Republican districts. Now today in 2023, I think it was actually. So it's even a couple of years ago, it's like 60 of the poorest, most low income districts are Republican districts. Air. I'm watching Andrew make a face like that's not right, but I'm pretty sure.
- [35:09]
Jonathan Cohn
I'm pretty sure I have no idea.
- [35:11]
Host
Okay.
- [35:11]
Sarah Longwell
All right. Well, I am, I haven't. I have a. I have a 97 confidence interval that I am, I am, I'm pretty close. And so that is a real shift for who Republican voters are. And when it comes to white working class voters, you know, the, the, that really put Trump over the edge. A lot of them are under 50k, like their households under 50k. And so I don't think though the idea that it's sort of like Trump saying like, well, we're going to lower grocery prices on day one. I mean, it is, what you're seeing here is just an absolute willingness to lie. And I don't. If Republicans were just be honest about what it is they're doing, that would be one thing. Like, because it used to be the Republicans would say these programs are unsustainable. They're unsustainable for the following reasons. Like, we've got to get the debt under control. Like, none of that is what we're talking about here. I also just want to say on Medicaid real quick, there's this idea that a, It's a bunch of illegals on Medicaid. No. Number two, I think people think that like the government sending checks the way they do with Social Security or something else, like that's not what Medicaid is. It is just that you are able to see a doctor and that's it. Like you're able to go to the doctor and so there's no free loading. Yeah, it's sort of a different thing. Right. They're just like collecting stuff or. No, they go there when they're sick and get health care and when you don't treat people, it's. There's a lot right now like people get, like people are gonna die, which is true. But the reason that they are going to die is because they're not going to be able to go to the doctor. But it's not just that people will die. It's also that people will let conditions go for a very long time and it will ultimately in the long term probably be more expensive when a lot of poor people don't have access to preventative care. And so I just, I don't think that this is a President or Republican members of Congress, like, they don't really care about people and they don't care about the fiscal responsibility or sustainability of it all, which is why it feels so empty and cynical right now, I think.
- [37:28]
Host
Yeah, for sure. Well, we'll see. Tomorrow they're gonna have the bill signing and then begins the process of selling it, implementing it, framing it, debating over it. This is, you know, just the beginning in some ways. All right, Andrew Egger, Sarah Longwell, Jonathan Cohn, thank you guys for doing this. To the audience who watched, honestly, thank you for doing this. It's been a journey. We've had a couple of these live streams over the past week or so and they've been great. We appreciate your feedback. We appreciate your support. Subscribe. Both become members. Yes, we. I want. Should I say we. Yesterday we hit 100,000 Substack subscribers, which was an. A momentous achievement for us. If you're not part of the community, I would recommend you do it. It's so. It's such an amazing community. We're producing so much good quality stuff, including stuff like this. Although this is for free, so subscribe to the substack. Subscribe to our YouTube page as well where you get stuff like this. Have a great fourth of July, guys. You have a great fourth of July too. We will talk on the flip side. Take care.
- [38:30]
Sarah Longwell
Happy 4th. America's still a great country.