UPDATE: The Democratic Party’s most trustworthy policy-nerd, David Dayen, headlined on July 3rd, “Republicans Are Cutting Medicare. Not Only Medicaid, Medicare. Passage of the Big Beautiful Bill will force mandatory sequestration that will mean half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts.” And he reported that,
Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.
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The only two U.S. federal Departments that get increased funding under President Trump’s “Big and Beautiful Bill” (BBB) are the Defense Department and the Homeland Security Department. A fiscal hawk, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (who opposed this bill), was correct when he said on June 1st, “One of the things this big and beautiful bill is, is, it’s a vehicle for increasing spending for the military and for the border. It’s about $320 billion in new spending. To put that in perspective, that’s more than all the DOGE cuts that we have found so far. So, the increase in spending put into this bill exceeds the DOGE cuts.” And, of course, the DOGE cuts hit mainly America’s poorest. And, of course, the BBB’s cuts — being in all Departments OTHER THAN those two — likewise hit mainly America’s poorest.
On July 3rd, as shown on C-Span, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries gave his 8-hours and 44-minutes-long speech to delay the vote on this bill for as long as he would want, which turned out NOT to be until the end of July 4th (the date when Trump had promised to be signing it), and his speech ended just at 1:38 PM, not even 24 hours. Then, Majority Leader Mike Johnson spoke and said of that speech by Jeffries, “It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth.” Then Johnson noted that “Scripture” had been cited and honored many times during the debate on both sides but especially by Republicans, and he announced “We are finally ready to fulfill our promise to the American people.” “The American people chose … the Republican Party.” “This Big Beautiful Bill embodies all the promises .. and we’re delivering on all of them with this Big Beautiful Bill.” “Democrats deliver performances, and Republicans deliver results.” “We live in the greatest nation in the history of the world, it’s not even CLOSE!” “It is our Creator who gives us our rights — they come from God Himself [NOT from the U.S. Constitution, which doesn’t even MENTION any ‘God’].” He then ended at 2:07, and the voting [“on Motion to Concur in the Senate Amendment” thus making the Senate’s bill be the House’s bill] began — the bill passed at 2:23PM, by 218 to 214, and the way it happened is that around ten Republicans who feared they’d lose their seats if they were on record as having voted for Trump’s bill, changed during the final 30 seconds of the voting, to switch from “Not Voting” to voting “Yes” on the bill. Then was announced “The House stands adjourned until Monday July 7th.” The result was thus a nail-biter until the last few seconds. Trump won. America and the world (because of the continuing increases in America’s armaments-purchases and thus miliary invasions) lost.
As I had headlined on July 2nd, “U.S. Congress Demands Trump Spend Even More on the Military”. That sentiment was bipartisan — BOTH Parties, not merely the Republicans. It isn’t only America’s Presidents who are extreme neoconservatives — supporters of expanding even more the power of America’s military-industrial complex.
This is the U.S.-and-allied vision of ‘democracy’. ABC News had reported, on the morning of July 2nd, that the leadership of the U.S. House of ‘Representatives’ — all of whom are Republicans — said, about the Republican U.S. President’s tax-and-spend bill for the coming year, that “The American people gave us a clear mandate, and after four years of Democrat failure, we intend to deliver without delay,” his “Big Beautiful Bill” onto his desk, to sign into law on July 4th. By the phrase “a clear mandate,” they were referring to the American people’s having been given a choice between the billionaires-funded Democratic National Committee’s (DNC’s) choices for President and for Congress, versus the billionaires-funded Republican National Committee’s (RNC’s) choices for President and for Congress, and chose the Republican billionaires’ choices, instead of the Democratic billionaires’ choices. That’s what they meant by saying “The American people gave us a clear mandate.”
However, all of the many polls specifically about the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill” for the coming fiscal year, make absolutely clear that the American people detest it; and here will be presented the most relevant examples of this overwhelming evidence that the Republican billionaires’ policy-priorities (as embodied in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”) are actually the exact opposite of — instead of representative of — the American people’s policy-priorities:
On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.
Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies).
This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s.
All of this had actually started on 25 July 1945 and is now climaxing. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s speech on July 3rd even spent some time condemning the Soviet Union and assuming that Russia is still a communist country and must therefore be defeated. Nobody in Congress points out such lies when they are made in Congress. Such lies are necessary in order to fool enough fools so as for America’s billionaires’ agents to continue winning public offices in this ‘democracy’.
On July 2nd, I headlined “How the U.S. Government Constantly Lies to Impose Its Dictatorship”, and discussed and disproved the lie by both of America’s political Parties, that because they had won an election, “The American people gave us a clear mandate.” Instead, it’s like their having offered a victim a choice between cyanide and arsenic, and calling this choice the victim’s “freedom,” and the American people’s “democracy.” It’s not democracy, at all.
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