Letters from an American - June 28, 2025

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

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June 28, 2025. Last night, just before midnight, Republicans released their new version of the Omnibus Reconciliation Bill. It's a sign of just how unpopular this bill is that they released the new version just before midnight on a Friday night, a time that is the graveyard of news stories. Over the course of today, the contours of the revised measure have become clearer. Democratic challenges and the Senate parliamentarian convinced Republican senators to remove policy provisions from the bill

that were either especially incendiary or did not meet the rules for budget reconciliation bills. Those challenges preserved the Consumer Financial Protection Board, limited a rule that prevented states from regulating artificial intelligence, prevented the selling off of public lands, eliminated vouchers for religious schools, and so on. Despite these changes, the final measure retains its original structure. That structure tells us a lot about the world today's Republican

lawmakers envision. The centerpiece of the bill remains its extension of the 2017 tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, making those tax cuts permanent. The tax structure in the measure funnels wealth from the poorest Americans to the top 1%. According to Alyssa Fowers and Hannah Dormito of the Washington Post, the Senate slashed the apparent cost of the bill by using a new method to calculate the numbers. Under the traditional way of estimating the cost of a bill, the new measure would add $4.2 trillion to the national debt. But using the gimmick of ignoring the tax extensions by saying they are simply a continuation of policies already in place,

the Senate claims the bill will cost $442 billion, just a tenth of what the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculates. According to immigration scholar Erin Reichlin Melnick, the measure also provides an additional $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants on top of its current annual budget of $3.4 billion. It adds $14.4 billion for transportation and removal on top of the current annual budget of $750 million. It also adds $8 billion for new ICE hires and retention.

Reikland-Melnick notes that this budget will give ICE more money for detention than it gives the entire US Bureau of Prisons. The Department of Homeland Security reflected the heart of this budget today when it posted on social media an image of four alligators wearing ICE hats, an apparent reference to the construction of a migrant detention facility in the Everglades in Florida, with the comment, coming soon. To offset some of the tax cuts in the measure, the Senate bill cuts $930 billion out of Medicaid, more than the House bill cut, and according to Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, makes additional cuts to

Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the measure will cause 11.8 million Americans to become uninsured, almost a million more than would have lost health insurance under the House version. In Politico Today, Meredith Lee Hill reported that every major health system in Louisiana is warning House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, and the rest of the state's congressional delegation, that the Senate Republicans' planned Medicaid cuts would be historic in their devastation. The Senate's revised measure will hurt health care and undermine the state's budget, they wrote.

But these economic consequences pale in comparison to the harm that will be caused to residents across the state, regardless of insurance status, who will no longer be able to get the care that they need. Tonight, 51 senators voted to advance the bill, with 49 opposing it. Republicans Tom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky voted with the Democrats to stop the bill from moving forward. Tillis has been clear that he could not support the bill's cuts to Medicaid. Immediately, Trump said he would back a primary challenger to tell us, saying he would be looking for someone who will properly represent the great people of North Carolina.

After forcing changes to the measure through challenges accepted by the Senate parliamentarian, Democrats tonight called out Republicans for releasing the new bill in the middle of last night and then trying to call a vote on it in the middle of tonight. They are demanding that the entire 940-page bill be read on the Senate floor. As the Republican attempt to hide the budget reconciliation bill suggests, it is enormously unpopular. In 1890, the Republicans forced through Congress a similarly unpopular measure, the McKinley Tariff, the law President Donald Trump has spoken of as a model for his economic policies.

Like today's budget reconciliation bill, the McKinley Tariff skewed the country's economy even more strongly toward the very wealthy, putting more money in the pockets of the richest Americans at the expense of the poorest. The McKinley Tariff passed in a chaotic congressional session in May 1890, with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over one another. All Democrats voted against the measure, and when it passed in the House, Republicans cheered and clapped at their victory. You may rejoice now, a Democrat yelled across the aisle, but next November you'll mourn. Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated

the Republican Party, giving the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House and preserving Republican control of the Senate only because three Republican senators had voted against the tariff. More than creating a bad midterm for Republicans though, the fight over the McKinley tariff hammered home to ordinary Americans that the system was rigged against them. Since the 1880s, Americans had seen the rise of extraordinarily wealthy industrialists who built palaces on New York's Fifth Avenue, like Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt's,

which cost more than $44 million in today's dollars. There, in 1883, she threw a famous costume ball where 1,200 guests dressed as birds and hornets as well as knights and famous kings and queens, including Marie Antoinette, used golden spoons at their $25,000 meal. The popular press closely followed the ball and the social competition that followed it. To workers surviving on pennies and farmers gouged by railroads, such lavish displays of wealth seem not just outrageous, but a sign that something had gone badly wrong in American society.

Surely, they thought, a democratic government should not so obviously favor the wealthy. The fight over the McKinley Tariff gave opponents proof that Congress was working for the rich. In the Alliance summer of 1890, newspapers sprang up and speakers crisscrossed the plains, reminding voters that the government was supposed to treat all interests equally.

The famous farmers orator, Mary Elizabeth Lease, told audiences that Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. She told farmers to raise less corn and more hell. They did. In the 1890 elections, Alliance members backed Democrats who supported their cause, and they elected 44 members of Congress, three senators, and four governors, and gained control of eight state legislatures.

Members of both parties listened to the developing anger over economic injustice and shared the fears of Alliance members that democracy was collapsing under an oligarchy of industrialists. Their insistence that a democratic government should not favor any specific sector of society but should work for the good of all resonated with voters across parties. And lawmakers, especially younger ones, eager to build a following, listened. By 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican,

was leading the demand for fair government. He called for a square deal for everyone. The Boston Globe explained, justice for all alike, a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor, is the Roosevelt ideal to be attained by the framing and the administration of the law. And he would tell you that that means Mr. J.P. Morgan and Mr. J.D. Rockefeller,

as well as the poor fellow who cannot pay his rent. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.