Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: House Passes Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Andrew Egger, Sam Stein, Sarah Longwell, and Jonathan Cohn discuss the House vote on Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Okay, we are live. Guys, we're live. We have just finished an 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 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's get your take on where we stand right now. You know, is it bad if I start this off by saying Congress is so annoying? No. Like, 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 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 been waiting for so long. And that was Hakeem Jeffries fault because Hakeem started at like, I don't know,

445 or something this morning. Yeah. But yesterday, it was the Republicans people going back and forth or having people, you know, leave and come back. 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 nos on this bill get strong armed into becoming yeses. And so, you know, the way that, you know, because 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 onto is the, uh, like fortitude of Hakeem Drefri's ability to stand for a long period of time and talk to the Victor Gould, the spoils, right? You win the house, you get the power. Yeah. Yeah, well to the victor go the spoils, right? You win the house, you get the power. Yeah, and 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? 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 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. Does he mean temperature? It is very hot outside. Yeah, it's very hot here. I would say DC has 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.

It's like, you're sitting in the chamber that was ransacked and you can't bring yourself to put up a plaque honoring the cops who protected you on January 6th. 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. Oh, yeah.

And he's still, he's got this Kevin McCarthy, like, real smarm, but he does this real, like, laughing at the Democrats type thing, this kind of sly nod 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 is actually going to do. Yeah, Andrew, my favorite part was he spends like 15 minutes being like the Democrats and what the bill is actually going to do. Yeah.

Andrew, my favorite part was he spends like 15 minutes being like the Democrats are the anti-Christ, they hate cops, they don't believe in 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 just stuck the knife into them for a good 10 minutes. Anyways, putting aside Mike Johnson, what do you think of how we got to this moment?

Well, let me say one more thing about Mike Johnson, just to concur with that point. It's almost like a kind of code switching, right? He's just so comfortable, and he slips effortlessly back and forth between these various modes of Republican communication of like, yeah, you know, we might have a lot of like 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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. Cohen, I'm going to get to you in one second, but Serb, I want to bring you on this one

because 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. I guess I should just ask, what is one to make of the profound lack of principle here?

And the willingness just to sort of have the one overriding principle being, I guess, helping Trump or sticking it to the Dems. Yeah. What do we call it? Is it RACO? Republicans Always Sticking Out? Yeah, Republicans Always Sticking Out. I think that's what we were talking about on the secret pod this morning.

Yeah, look, Trump told them to get it done and they did. I got to say it just, uh, hardest hit Lisa Murkowski, who said, well, you know, guys, the house is going to fix this. Yes. Yes. I voted to punt, uh, but I'm sure they will, they will take what my, my concerns and they will make a better bill out of it. Uh, I, I don't, and maybe Cohn can tell us if this bill changed at all in any what my concerns and they will make a better bill out of it.

And maybe Cohn can tell us if this bill changed at all in any real or meaningful way. Yeah, right, no. So Lisa, I don't know if you know this, but you got played. 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 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 gonna end up, now this bill, it's about 330,000 per grandchild. And so it is just an, it's an absence of principle, but it is a real showing of how much Trump can just make them all fall in line. And they, you know, I didn't even just simple that hard is it a simple as that? I'm saying is it simple if we don't fall in line. We're gonna lose and we don't want to lose

I mean, I guess that's it right, you know Tim and I were talking about this on on TNL and I think this is probably as close to a good explanations you can get which Is there's like a lunch table theory of politics, right, which is just it's pure pressure. Like they're like, you're going to be the one holdout. It's not just that they 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. 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 the taxes going up.

How true is that, that they stack the benefits and push back the costs? Yeah, I mean, I've heard that too. I'm skeptical. I mean, you've heard that too. I'm skeptical. I mean, you know, 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, you know, 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.

You know, 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 is... I don't know, the article, the article write-up said that they anticipated the Medicaid cost- Oh, did they? See, I didn't even see that. Oh, well, there you go. So, 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 the sort of when factories are starting to close, that we're built up to take advantage of the subsidies

for clean energy that are getting yanked back. States are gonna make budget decisions early and pull back on these things. I do think, obviously it depends a lot 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 healthcare space. People are primed to believe that Republicans have taken away healthcare 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, something in this bill touches it. And Democrats are going to be able to make the argument that, hey, here's this bill. They made these changes. Now this is happening. Now your health care is getting more expensive. Well, that's the case, yeah.

That's the case for any party in power, right? It's like you see this in midterms 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 immigration lawyers. We're talking about militarized borders, detention centers, that type of stuff. I can imagine the next six months, this goes into hyperdrive.

And I just don't know, honestly, how it plays politically. Yeah, and you say kind of like mass deportation, right? But 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 away from, or at least partially away from this promise

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 a shift.

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 ordinary immigration court process, which was a lot of 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 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 then make these sorts of judgments. So I'm going to come to you very quickly. I just want to give people watching state of play here. You see two nay votes. That's Tom Matze 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. Uh, 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 I mean Andrew did it and he's right. It's it's it's all about we're gonna 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 three.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 us shuttling people to foreign countries.

And we just got the information last night about the conditions that Elbriego Garcia was being detained in, which sounded horrific and god awful, and also about 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 am and but it's interesting because the immigration part was really the carrot.

Like, for us, I think, you know, people are, 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. They told us it was. 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 the American people have been telling us to get this done. 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. But didn't you think that JD Vance tweet yesterday was kind of telling

where he said everything else is kind of minutiae? No, I said it's immaterial. Immaterial. Sorry. The only thing that matters to JD 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, 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? Remember tweet if they have their money is almost bigger than a bunch of militaries It's like ice is not gonna be bigger than a lot of other countries militaries, which I Yeah, it's like ice is not gonna be bigger than a lot of other countries militaries, which I Actually don't think Americans were voting for but that that 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 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 the tax cut that Trump did was enormous. It was mostly structured for the top earners in the country. Walking that back slightly when you are this much in debt is just a responsible thing to do. It's what a responsible country does. Cohen, why don't you use your wonkiness to unpack, if you can remember it, all the mistruths or misdirections of Johnson's speech with respect to this bill?

Yeah. So, I mean, the one that sort of jumped out at me that Sarah was just talking about was that, 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. They if they don't directly rely on Medicaid, they have family who do sometimes for long term care, things like that.

They're going to see the effects of that, again, for the sake of a nominal tax cut. This idea that I think they had, 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. I mean you can you can you can be in favor of this bill, you can be against 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 the question going forward is how long can they keep denying it? At what point does reality intervene with that? And can they be held accountable for it?

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 had 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? 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 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, you know, that just change all kinds of make all kinds of tweaks to the to the enrollment procedure for getting on the program. And you know, any one of these, you know, you can debate them. And some of them sound actually, when you when you I think and Sarah can back me up on this, the work requirement piece is the one that I think does pull 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. They know that. This is by design. We know statistically that most people on Medicaid either work or have a disability or 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. All right. Let's just finalize this by going big picture here. And Sarah, you can start.. I want to just kind of push on this point. 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. That's why they

held this open. I don't know 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, DC 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 they 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? 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 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 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 like his ability to basically clear, I mean, JD Vance was not gonna win that primary

if Donald Trump hadn't intervened and endorsed him. And so I think part of what we're seeing is not such as 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 is not there. John, that vote failed because John McCain did this. Number one, you had principled John McCain, but Lisa Murkowski back then didn't take a kickback for her state. Like she did this time.

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 in Paramount, caving to him, buying him off, giving him $16 million in a case they absolutely didn't want to do. over time, right? You got this just this week, you got 60 minutes and paramount, 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 it, there's this horrible piece in the New York Times about Trump's charm offenses. I saw that. Oh my God. 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&Ms and like just, and they went so cheap.

They went so cheap. These guys, uh, they went for like a couple polo shirts from the, the pro shop at Mar-a-Lago gave him a vote. And so I think that it's not Trump who's different. I think it's Republicans and people who are different. Interesting. Andrew, do you agree? I mean, she is the boss. I guess he can have. I agree. I agree. Even on the merits. I don't think 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

grimest 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. Handpicked the last time around, and maybe we'll get more options in this term. The one... So, yeah, I mean, I hope it's an apex power moment. I hope because that would imply that it diminishes going forward. That's true. Yeah, I mean, sure hope it's an apex power moment. I hope because that would imply that it diminishes going forward.

That's true. Yeah, I mean, it's true. No, this is the apex. It's the worst. Yeah. Well, they're not doing another big bill. Yeah. The one thing I wanted to say on the merit, like just to go all the way back for one second

to the Jefferies and the Johnson speeches, because I think this is kind of like 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 Jeffries argument is Republicans, by everything that they want to do and everything in this bill right now, are actively screwing you by making your finances worse 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. This is the one that Johnson's making. He's not just totally making stuff up when he's saying, you know, 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 not going gonna see that play out in their own lives for the reasons that you talk about. 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 the narratives you see being realer to you than real. 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 out 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. supposed to be the party that's going to be, you know, the new working class party, all this stuff about green energy and new. These factories were deliberately put by the Biden administration in red states. I mean, I remember that article in the Post of the Times was like this factory in Tulsa, $700 million factory that's just going to like stop. That's Tulsa. Not like, you know, this 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. Uh, and I don't know if I ever will, honestly.

Uh, but Cohen, am I overstating it? Is it, or is that true? I know. I think it is true. I mean, what's the solar capital manufacturing of America right now? Texas, you know, where, where biggest battery factories for electric vehicles? Kentucky, South Carolina, those are all going to go up and smoke. You know, clinics across all these rural communities are going to struggle and start, you know, pulling back services. And then look, that's why they moved so quickly, right? 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, if 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 gonna 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.

If you face things in over time, that means there's time to dial them down or change them. We've seen that happen before. This, you know, this is an ending, but it's not exactly an ending. No, for sure. All right, Sarah, final thoughts? 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 years ago, it's like 60

of the poorest, most low income districts are Republican districts. I'm watching Andrew make a face like that's not right, but I'm pretty sure it's right. I made no face. I have no idea. All right. Well, I am. It's news to me. I have a 97% confidence interval that 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, 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 gonna 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 uh, and

That's it like you're able to go to the doctor. Um, and so There's no free loading Yeah, it's sort of a different thing Um, 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, there's a lot right now, people get like, people are going to 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.

Yeah, for sure. Well, we'll see. Tomorrow, they're going to have the bill signing and then begins the process of selling it, implementing it, framing it, debating over it. This is 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.

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