Senator Susan Collins has caused financial harm to Maine because her vote to support the Big Ugly bill cut health care for thousands)

COLLINS’S PORK BARREL BALANCE SHEET DOESN’T ADD UP - ….and besides, it’s just more deficit spending

(Op-ed in the Press Herald) Maine can’t afford Senator Susan Collins’ earmarks: The numbers and the reality on the ground don’t lie. 

Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins

Wayne Clark, of Durham, is an eighth-generation Mainer, a retired public relations and marketing executive and author of The Blue Yankee on Substack.

Sen. Susan Collins keeps reminding us how much money she brings into Maine. That money comes from congressional “earmarks” (sometimes known as “pork”). She says she has brought in $1.5 billion over the past five years.

There’s another side to the ledger, though: how much has Sen. Collins’ subservience to Donald Trump and the GOP cost Maine?
Collins (and to be fair most of her colleagues) did not lift a finger to stop DOGE, 😡illegal tariffs, illegal wars, deteriorating foreign relations and the One Big Beautiful (Ugly❗) Bill Act. Nor has she tried to rein in Trump. Can we afford the cost of her votes and inaction❓ First, let’s do a numbers check.

Collins brought in 💲200 million worth of pork in 2022, $308 million in 2023, 💲576 million in 2024, 💲0 in 2025 (no earmarks for anyone that year due to the continuing resolution) and 💲428.6 million in 2026. So, the average per year over the past five years is roughly 💲302 million. Against that 💲302 million number, let’s look at how much Collins’ and Congress’ inaction and obedience to Trump has cost Mainers.

The Maine Center for Economic Policy reports that the total tariffs collected by Trump in the first year equal about 💲1,100 per household. In Maine, that translates to a total of 💲677 million. And that’s just one year. Most of that has been paid by Mainers in the form of higher prices.

The budget bill imposed new work requirements on Medicaid recipients (even though most already work). Maine DHHS estimates that 30,000 Mainers are expected to lose coverage in the first year alone because they can’t navigate the reporting requirements. Just administering the work requirement paperwork will cost Maine $8 million in year one, and 💲5.5 million per year thereafter.
Trump and the GOP declined to extend the tax subsidies that made coverage under the Affordable Care Act actually affordable for many people. A report from Defend America Action says that Mainers who buy health insurance through the ACA exchange will see their coverage costs for next year increase as much as 💲900 per month.
The budget bill adds a work requirement to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and reduces the federal contribution to the costs of running the program. Total loss of money to Maine❓= 💲145 million per year.
Those people who are losing Medicaid covera(ge and many of the ones losing their ACA subsidies will be uninsured. That hits our hospitals: the loss of coverage will cost Maine hospitals 💲66 million per year, and free care is expected to go up by 💲86 million per year by 2034.

Canadian tourism is down (-) 40％, as a result of tariffs and Trump’s insulting behavior toward Canada. In 2024, Canadians spent about $500 million in Maine. So that means Trump and the Congress that let him get away with tariffs and bad behavior cost our tourism sector about $200 million in just one year.

The combination of tariffs and the Iran war have skyrocketed our costs. Coffee is up, beef is up. Gas is up by nearly a dollar in Maine, and it has been up as much as 💲1.40 a gallon. The war Collins didn’t vote against nine times has cost everyone at the pumps.
Now, I wouldn’t add up the numbers above and pretend to have an accurate, defensible total. But it doesn’t take long to overtop Collins’ 💲302.5 million of pork. In fact, the Maine Center for Economic Policy totals the cost to Maine just from the budget bill at 💲400 million per year.

That’s a lot of money talk. The human costs are harder to quantify, but they’re very real. It seems to me we simply can’t afford six more years of this. Pork or not, we can’t afford Susan Collins.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans cannot govern! Americans need leadership but Republicans play partisan politics with our lives

There are no winners in a government shutdown, but Democrats are right to fight | Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial

Increasingly outrageous actions from Trump and his administration, including the absolute disregard for Congress’ power of the purse, have left Democratic leaders with little recourse.

Once this federal government shutdown ends — whenever that may be — it is inevitable someone will declare victory. 

Nevertheless, as things stand, there will be no real winners.

It won’t be the federal workers — including more than 100,000 in Philadelphia — who either get to sit at home or labor indefinitely without a paycheck. Nor will it be the wider economy, as the last shutdown cost Americans $3 billion. Let alone the dwindling trust that our leaders can get anything done.

Even so, what other choice did Democrats have?

In March, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) came under fire from many in his own party after he was seen as caving to Donald Trump when he corralled enough senators to vote to keep the government open. Back then, Schumer believed the opposite: that a shutdown would only empower and embolden the president’s ugly smash-mouth style of governance.

Months of increasingly outrageous actions from Trump and his vengeful administration, including the absolute disregard for Congress’ power of the purse, have left Democratic leaders with little recourse but to make their stand.

“How could we negotiate a bipartisan agreement and then have the president unilaterally through impoundment, or the Republican Party through rescissions, and the president unilaterally through pocket rescissions, undo it all without any input,” Schumer said after he and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) met with Trump and GOP congressional leaders Monday.

Representing the state of bipartisan discourse, irresponsible Donald Trump responded by posting a racist deepfake video to social media depicting Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a mustache while Schumer vulgarly disparaged Democrats and immigrants.

As the shutdown took hold on Wednesday, Republicans demanded Senate Democrats “abandon their radical demands and fund the government.” 

Those radical demands❓ That affordable healthcare access for millions of Americans be protected.

Trump’s cruel signature legislation, the 🤢 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, not only extended his first term’s tax cuts, but also added additional reductions — with the biggest benefits going to the wealthiest few. To offset the loss of revenue, Republicans in Congress instituted funding cuts to Medicaid and changes to the Affordable Care Act❗😥

Democrats want to reverse the Medicaid cuts and extend federal tax credits that reduce the cost of health insurance purchased through ACA (Affordable Care Act) marketplaces, which are set to expire by the end of the year. Taken together, Republican proposals are projected to leave 16 million people without health insurance by 2034.

In saner times, the GOP would see the Democrats’ demands as a win-win scenario. The party could be seen as compromising on the most unpopular aspect of legislation, so toxic that they are actively trying to rebrand it. Not to mention that communities that voted for Trump are likely to be deeply hurt by the cuts, including by the closures of hospitals in rural areas, which depend on Medicaid.

But these are not those times. Already, many Republican legislators are misrepresenting Democratic efforts, casting them as shutting down the government over giving free healthcare to people who are in the country illegally.💥🤥

This is as patently false as it is shameless.

Yet, while Democrats are right to hold the line on healthcare, they are unlikely to prevail in the shutdown, because there is no one on the other side willing to negotiate in good faith. Trump has already promised to use the shutdown to further gut the federal workforce. That the president’s plan may be legally questionable fails to deter an administration intent on flouting the law.

The best chance for those who will lose their healthcare is for Democrats to regain control of Congress. In the meantime, Democrats must remind voters that this clash is about policy differences, that they are willing to compromise, and that while what’s happening is not good, the alternative is worse.

This shutdown fight is worth having. But thanks to the selfish and partisan Republicans, America has already lost.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans including Senator Susan Collins must stand up for American health care!

Trump’s Harmful Policies Are Endangering Your Health

Editorial opinion published in The New York Times

Donald Trump turned Make America Healthy Again into one of his administration’s signature promises. It is a laudable goal, too. By several measures, the United States is the world’s least healthy high-income country.

Nevertheless, as is so often the case with Trump, he both identified a real problem and enacted a set of policies that will worsen that problem. With public health, the damage could be vast. His administration is rejecting basic medical knowledge and turning back the clock to an era when people were sicker and died sooner.

The administration’s hostility to lifesaving vaccines, led by the incompetent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has already contributed to a rise in measles.  Trump’s cuts to scientific research will forestall future treatments of cancer, heart disease and childhood illnesses. His cuts to Medicaid, which pay for tax breaks for the wealthy, will leave millions of Americans without health insurance and, by extension, health care. His rollback of environmental regulations has allowed corporations to pump more pollution into the air and water, which will contribute to lung diseases and other ailments.

As disappointing as the pre-Trump trends in public health were, Americans remain far healthier than in previous generations. Life expectancy today is almost 80, up from less than 60 a century ago. In that century, we have conquered smallpox and polio. We have cleaned our cities of the smog that was once normal. We have made progress against cancers and cardiovascular diseases that once were death sentences. Trump and Kennedy are dismantling the eight decades of work that made that progress possible. There is a great deal to lose.

Here’s what they are doing to harm our health:

1. Exposing Americans to preventable diseases: The taming of infectious diseases, including polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, tetanus, influenza and, most recently, Covid-19, has been one of humankind’s greatest achievements. These diseases have all been made far less deadly, and in some cases virtually nonexistent, thanks to vaccines. Mr. Trump himself recently said that vaccines work, “pure and simple.”

Yet as his top health official he has appointed a conspiracist, Mr. Kennedy, who exaggerates or outright lies about the risks that come with these vaccines. Mr. Kennedy has filled an important federal panel, which shapes which vaccines are covered by insurers, with other conspiracists. Republican-led states are following the administration’s lead; Florida is trying to repeal vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

These misguided changes are already having an effect. The Covid vaccine has become harder to get, even for some vulnerable people. Childhood vaccination rates, which were falling before Mr. Trump returned to office, seem likely to fall further as Mr. Kennedy fans parents’ fears. Already, measles outbreaks have occurred in Texas and elsewhere, and the effects may be far worse in the coming years as society risks losing the herd immunity that it had achieved.

We know about the consequences from these diseases because humanity has lived them. Before vaccines, illnesses like smallpox, measles and polio left people scarred, paralyzed, blind or dead. Many of the victims were children. The Trump administration is condemning more people to suffer and die from diseases that we know how to prevent.

2. Making a future pandemic more deadly: Nobody knows when the next pandemic will arrive. Whenever it does, the United States may be even less prepared than it was for Covid.


With Elon Musk’s help, Trump this year dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. He also withdrew from the World Health Organization, the global hub for tracking health emergencies, and emptied the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. These moves may have their biggest effects on poor citizens of other countries who previously benefited from American aid, but they put Americans at risk, too.

Trump fired the experts and community health workers who once monitored the world for outbreaks and helped restrain those outbreaks before they spread. In the past few decades alone, these workers led the fight against SARS, Zika, Ebola, bird flu and other illnesses, and Americans were largely spared from their effects.

Perhaps the strangest part of Trump’s health policy is his turn against mRNA vaccines. In his first term, his administration helped make possible the stunningly rapid development of mRNA vaccines for Covid. Trump could claim mRNA as his greatest accomplishment. Instead, he caved to vaccine skeptics within the MAGA movement and canceled $500 million in contracts to develop future mRNA vaccines.😓😨😥 That will slow the development of treatments for a future pandemic, when every week without a vaccine can lead to thousands of additional deaths.

3. Eliminating future cures:  In addition to cutting mRNA funding, the administration has sharply cut medical research funding. Mr. Trump and his aides have justified these cuts by citing government efficiency and the “wokeness” of the universities that conduct much of the research. But science funding represents just 0.6 percent of federal spending, and most medical researchers have little to do with the wokeness wars. Their goal is to find effective treatments.

Without federal funding, much of this research — into cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, addiction, diabetes and more — will not happen. It involves basic science that tends to be unprofitable for any one company but can have enormous returns for society. In all, basic research may lose one-third of its federal funding.

Consider the work that a team of researchers at the University of Mississippi and Ohio State University is doing into glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer that is usually deadly within 18 months of diagnosis. The Trump administration cut the team’s funding without a good explanation, forcing the project to pause. After the funding was cut, Eden Tanner, a chemist on the project, received a flood of emails from people affected by the disease. “It’s really heartbreaking to tell them,” she said.

4. Dirtying the air and water:  One public-health success story of the past half-century has been the sharp reduction of air and water pollution. As a result of regulations and clean energy breakthroughs, we breathe and drink many fewer toxins than Americans did decades ago. Pollution-related illnesses, like severe asthma, have declined as a result.

This trend may now be over. The Trump administration is hollowing out the Environmental Protection Agency, rolling back regulations, withdrawing support for clean energy and promoting dirty energy that causes illnesses. One example: The administration has given hundreds of industrial facilities a two-year pass on pollution rules. Another example: The J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Michigan, was on the verge of closing until the Trump administration issued an emergency order, forcing it to stay open — even though the power company had not asked to keep it open. The plant continues to operate today, producing fine particle pollution that is associated with cardiac problems, asthma and other lung diseases.

The effects will be largest in red states, which tend to have more industrial facilities and lighter regulation. In Texas, coal plants are now allowed to release more than twice as much wastewater pollution as they were at the beginning of this year, as well as more than five times as much sulfur dioxide and more than six times as much carbon dioxide, according to the Sierra Club. These changes are also likely to aggravate climate change.
5. Taking away medical care

Trump’s recently passed domestic policy law will leave 10 million Americans without health insurance, experts estimate. Another 4.2 million could lose health insurance if Republicans in Congress refuse to extend expanded tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. Together, these changes would undo about one-third of the coverage gains from that law.

Without health insurance, millions of Americans will not be able to get crucial medical care. A large recent study concluded that poor adults who received Medicaid were 21 percent less likely to die than those who were not enrolled. People with insurance are also more likely to be healthy enough to lead happy, productive lives than people without it. Among the biggest victims of the Medicaid cuts, as we recently explained, will be people addicted to opioids — a group Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to help.

The Medicaid cuts exist largely to finance tax cuts for affluent Americans. That same recent law also includes cuts to food stamps, which will leave poor Americans less able to feed their families and almost certainly less healthy. Wealthy Americans who do not need the money nonetheless receive more of it, while lower-income Americans lose food stamps and health coverage.

In each of these areas, it is easy to name ways that our health system has failed many Americans over the past few decades. Insurance is too expensive. Pollution is concentrated in lower-income communities. Cutting-edge medical treatments are sometimes available only to the affluent. Preventive care and chronic diseases receive too little attention from insurers, doctors, scientific researchers and government agencies. Ultraprocessed foods and “overmedicalization” have hurt children, as RFKjr (Kennedy) has noted.

All of which shows the need for a true Make America Healthy Again movement. Trump is not leading that movement, though. He is instead taking the country backward to a time when many health threats were much more ominous than they are today. Trump is surrendering America to curable diseases.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans shoving Project 2025 down American's throats and the side effects are nauseating

Donald Trump  lies about virtually everything and he lied to voters about the deeply unpopular Project 2025, but Americans are now living under the horror of this plan in real time. 🤥 The ramming of this horrible plan down our American throats is disgusting 🤢and unlawful, being accomplished with unauthorized executive orders. 

Echo essay published by Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.

So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.

Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.

Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox (Fake❗) News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”

On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”

The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.

Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”

EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.

As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.

Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”💢😧❗⚠️

Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. The day before the August 1 deadline, on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.

When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth.😱 ❗ But, the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now, than it was then.

And now the growing scandal around Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.

Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. A reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for❓😥”

Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report about the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.

And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report was dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.—

Notes:
https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/heritage-foundation-president-celebrates-supreme-court-immunity-decision-we-are

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-project-2025-broadly-known-severely-unpopular-voters-rcna172660

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2025-policy-america.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-we-are-2

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/us/politics/generals-trump.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/28/trump-federal-employees-preach-faith-work-00480696

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479240/columbia-trump-administration-settlement-details

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/business/media/fcc-skydance-merger-paramount.html

https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/supreme-court-puts-humphreys-executor-on-death-bed/
The Epstein Crisis No One Controls
Guest article by Michael Cohen…
Read more
8 hours ago · 855 likes · 130 comments · Michael Cohen and MeidasTouch Network

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-jail-video-investigation/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/26/doge-ai-tool-cut-regulations-trump/

https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/who-we-are/history

Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lupiv74kmm2n

thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lv7afo2dzk2z

© 2025 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Unsubscribe

Donald Trump cruelty is a disaster for hard working immigrant families: Big Ugly Bad Bill is punishment to innocent immigrants

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Marcala Garcia

A ‘big, beautiful’ disaster for immigrant families

What this law enshrines is not reform but punishment — it’s criminalizing immigration to the fullest extent possible.

Donald Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, now law, promises sweeping changes to the country’s immigration system and safety net. But for millions of immigrant families, it spells a future of fear, hardship, and exclusion.

Touted as a win for border security and fiscal restraint, the law pours unprecedented resources into immigration enforcement and border security — to the tune of $170 billion — while stripping away critical health care and food assistance.

Legal experts and community advocates have warned that the law’s harsh provisions — massive detention expansions, steep new immigration fees, and deep cuts to social programs — will destabilize families, endanger children, and undermine the very communities that help drive the nation’s economy.

Among the law’s most alarming provisions: $45 billion to expand detention capacity to more than 100,000 beds — rivaling the entire federal prison system — and $31 billion to expand immigration enforcement and deportation activity, which could lead to the hiring of as many as 10,000 new ICE agents. The result? More raids, more arrests, more fear.

It doesn’t stop there. The bill imposes financial barriers and new fees on immigrant families. For instance, asylum applications, once free, will now cost $100 (after House Republicans originally proposed $1,000) and work permits, also once free, will now cost $550.

Appeals of immigration decisions now cost $900, up from $110. For many immigrants, these fees represent an “unaffordable price tag on due process,” Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told NPR.

Then there’s the new 1 percent tax levied on remittances sent abroad, which disproportionately affects low-income immigrants whose families back home rely on that financial support. The law also bars some legally present immigrants from accessing Medicaid and restricts food assistance (SNAP) eligibility for certain immigrants.

“The Big Ugly Bill is incredibly irresponsible,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino advocacy organization, said in a statement.

The sweeping law, which also includes massive tax cuts for rich individuals, carries a hefty cost: It’s estimated that it will add more than $3.4 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. “Our children and grandchildren will have to pay for its massive debt, while obscene amounts of money will go to ICE policies that punish families and the essential workers our economy needs for their hard work and tax dollars,” Barba said.

What this law enshrines is not reform but punishment 😞😭— it’s criminalizing immigration to the fullest extent possible, monetizing some legal rights, and prioritizing cruelty over common sense. It is a legislative embodiment of Trumpism: performative and punitive.

For immigrant families, the “big, beautiful” promise has revealed its true face, and it surely is an ugly one.

This is an excerpt from ¡Mira!, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Marcela García.

Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans will deeply regret the immoral big bad ugly tax cuts for billionaires paid for by the working class

Donald Trump  bargained with Republicans in the middle of the night, to get what he wanted out of Congress; but it’s possible, in the coming years, that he is going to deeply regret and reject it.

Echo opinion published in New York Magazine "Intelligencer", by Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer

This isn’t because Trump has any particular laments about the devastating policy in the reconciliation package, which will gut social safety-net programs and cut taxes, particularly on the rich. He won’t lament ballooning the deficit, either. He doesn’t think too hard about any of that.

Rather, the so-called One Big Beautiful "Bullshit" 💩❗ Bill is bound to be a tremendous albatross for the Republicans charged with shepherding his agenda through Congress. 

It may, too, prove especially damaging for his plausible successor, J.D. Vance, who is still somewhat likely to be the 2028, Republican nominee, despite Trump’s flirtations with seeking an unconstitutional third term.

That’s because, in the end, Trump and congressional Republicans didn’t pursue any great policy commitments consistent with the populist, MAGA-infused realignment that delivered him a slim victory in the 2024, election. They didn’t, like far-right populists across the world, marry social conservatism and immigration crackdowns with a charge to safeguard the welfare state. 

Gutting health care isn’t what the far right does outside the United States. Trump, at least, was wise enough to not campaign on it last year.

But you can’t spin Americans about their health care. Failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 fueled a Democratic midterm wave the following year. And these cuts, which are going into effect, will do a great deal of tangible damage: $1.1 trillion stripped from the health-care system, including nearly a trillion from Medicaid. Yes, the prototypical Republican politician cares almost nothing about health insurance for the working class and poor — this outpost of socialism in our capitalist economy — but they’ll understand very soon that insulating their constituents from these cuts will not be simple. They may fantasize about a world where Medicaid cuts merely torment Blue America, those big cities stuffed with the urban poor who generally don’t back their candidates. But Medicaid is what keeps rural America afloat, especially the underfunded hospital systems. There’s a reason Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, backed away from the reconciliation bill: He saw the suffering that was coming.

The irony of this legislation is that the movement of the working class and poor into the MAGA coalition did nothing to save them from the brunt of these cuts. This is a bill from the old-guard Republican Party, one forever partial to elites. That party won this fight. It’s a reminder that fealty to Trump extends far more to the person than to policy. Yes, Republicans will bend to Trump’s whims, but the cannier conservatives always understood what mattered to Trump was the spectacle of signing any legislation by July 4. Trump wants a win for the sake of a win. He doesn’t much care what’s in a Big Beautiful Bill as long as he can sign it and brag about it. He can preen. He can (lie 🤥 ....like he always does) feel he has done something.

This is a domestic-policy bill, ultimately, that could have been belched out by any generic GOP administration — and in that sense, it doesn’t veer very much from Trump’s first term, when he rhetorically moved his party leftward on questions of economics and foreign policy but largely governed like the men he vanquished in the 2016, primary. There are no great surprises here; it’s merely the tax cuts generations of Republicans have brayed about. Adding spending on “border security,” meanwhile, is no revolution. 

Little of it is a coherent outgrowth of what happened last year, when Trump made tremendous inroads with Black, Latino, and Asian voters, portending a realignment that he has done almost nothing since to secure. The reconciliation package, above anything else, may be remembered just for the trillions it added to the national debt with virtually nothing to show for it. No budget holes are being blown open to give Americans much of anything.

Americans, on the whole, will be worse off for what just transpired in Washington. And those beleaguered, feckless Democrats will be handed a road map back to the House majority. The Senate is still the far tougher fight, but whatever messaging problems the Democrats have now will be solved, to a great degree, by next year. 

Democrats know how to campaign on health care; they’ve done it for years, and usually with success. A strong defense of Medicare and Medicaid always polls well. They can blast away at the DOGE cuts to the federal government, which very few voters actually wanted. Republicans will have full control of Congress for at least one more year, and that may mean yet another reconciliation package that causes a great deal of chaos and benefits the vanishingly few. The only comfort the left can take is that MAGA will have no permanent, longstanding majority in this country. It’s only downhill from here.

Donald Trump and the "Bible TRumping" Republican Speaker Mike Johnson enacted "Mass Cruelty" in the Big Bad Ugly Bill

New York Times Opinion by Brendan Buck*

Is This Really How We’re Legislating Now❓

"Bad political process can lead to bad policy and bad politics"
"...no serious effort was made to cover the costs of the tax cuts and new spending".

"Bible TRumping" Speaker Mike Johnson once again defied skeptics and found a majority in a high-stakes vote, with the House passing Donald Trump's big bad ugly policy bill on Thursday along party lines with a few Republicans voting with Democrats to oppose the Mass Cruelty legislation. 

"Bible Trumping" Speaker Johnson and John Thune, the Senate leader, ably made whatever deals and promises were necessary to get the bill through their chambers, and Republicans are celebrating it as a major victory. But, the wobbly passage of the fiscal package says more about the frivolity of the game Congress now plays than it does about how well (or badly ❗) G.O.P. congressional leaders played it.

Few seem to be happy with the actual product. 

(As a matter of fact, Senator Angus King I-ME on the Senate Floor: "This Tax Bill is 'Irresponsible, Regressive, and Downright Cruel'”.

Republicans and Democrats alike have found plenty to criticize about the substance of the bill: the cost, the cuts, the gimmicks. Just as concerning, though, is the way it came together — and what that says about America’s once admired legislative body.

The process was marred by dynamics that have increasingly undermined Congress’s status as a dominant and deliberative institution: The bill lacked a clear and inspired purpose; it supplanted the expertise of congressional committees for the whims of holdouts and the president; and it relied on the make-or-break reconciliation mechanism that limits the ability to write sound policy.

Congress is no longer in the business of thoughtful legislating. Its role has been reduced to putting political points on the board for the president.

Senator Joni Ernst as a a prophet:🙄 "We are all going to die"
IOW cuts to Medicaid will just accelerate the inevitable.

There are a series of changes in how leadership and legislating in Washington works. Republican House members have long argued that too much power is centralized in the speaker’s office. They’ve chafed at speakers, including the two I worked for, who have presented them with a plan and told them it was either the right way to go or the best we could do.

"Bible TRumping" Speaker Johnson has taken this criticism to heart, and his staying power as speaker can in part be attributed to the light touch he takes with his conference. 

This big bad bill was not viewed as the "'Bible TRumping" Mike Johnson plan". Seemingly his only restraint was what could get 218 votes in the House.

But, members of Congress today are not well suited to fill that policy vacuum. Too many see their jobs as playing characters in the Trump melodrama rather than serving as policymakers in a separate and equal legislative branch.

The downsides of this dynamic should now be clear.

Congress, particularly the House, is a body built around committees, which have jurisdiction over various areas of policy. This is where expertise is supposed to be housed. Historically, members of these committees have jealously defended their policy terrain, and they have been given deference to do their jobs.

However, this critical architecture has been collapsing in recent years. In this instance, "Bible TRumping" Speaker Johnson allowed rank-and-file members to end-run the committees of jurisdiction. After the committee process, the bill was workshopped through a series of hasty negotiations with holdout members such as with the changes to the state and local tax deductions. Medicaid policy, affecting tens of millions of Americans, appears to have been made on the fly.

In the Senate, the bill didn’t even go through a full, open committee process, and policy was still being written last weekend as senators began voting to proceed.

With committees relegated, there was no ownership of the product — and certainly little pride in it. With Medicaid, changes on the table ranged from adding work requirements for those receiving benefits to a wholesale restructuring of how the federal government funds the program. Until late in the process, many members didn’t know what was in or out, and certainly not how to sell it.

This lack of definition allowed Democrats to pounce. Bad process can lead to bad policy and bad politics.

I don’t mean the all-night voting in the Senate or both chambers passing legislation before official scorekeepers had even provided final cost estimates. Those are just unfortunate realities of legislative politics. There’s another process story that has been building for decades across both parties, as Congress increasingly relies on large legislative vehicles like this. Many of the issues with this package can be traced to the decision to put everything in one big bill. With little interest in policymaking through regular order, or bipartisan compromise, the majority is left to place all its eggs in the basket of the budget reconciliation process.

The wonky rules of the reconciliation process give the majority a narrow crack at avoiding the Senate filibuster — but the process also significantly limits how policy can be written. Generally speaking, everything must be drafted to address matters of spending or revenue. The 1974, Budget Act that created this process was intended to help Congress balance the budget. It’s now being used for issues like artificial intelligence standards and immigration policy.

This is a poor mechanism for addressing the nuances of complex policy. It also functionally means that the biggest policy changes both parties are making are increasingly partisan ones. 

Since Republicans are uninterested in working with Democrats through regular order, this bill was also viewed as the only train leaving the station — so anything and everything Republicans could think to throw in the bill, they did.😖😔😡😨

The legislative stew that resulted is not fine-tuned policy, nor does it offer a cohesive purpose. It’s just good enough for a Congress that doesn’t particularly care about being any better than “good enough.”

The bill does not improve America’s tax code. An extension of the 2017, tax law — which significantly simplified the tax code and which I helped pass as well as later working with groups that wanted it extended — ended up littered with new carve-outs and gimmicks, like no taxes on tips or overtime.

It does not strengthen our health care system. While the bill makes significant policy changes, and millions of Americans will feel the impact of Medicaid cuts, the motivation behind the bill’s health care reforms was budget savings — not better health care service or outcomes.

It will not better the nation’s fiscal trajectory. Despite the Medicaid cuts, no serious effort was made to cover the costs of the tax cuts and new spending.

There wasn’t even anything particularly MAGA about the bill.

None of that mattered. Leaders bet that members would not deny Donald Trump his bill signing, and they were right. 

Before final passage, there were gaping pockets of opposition from every corner of the House conference, almost all waved off by the simple argument that Republicans could not let Trump down. (OMG, this is not legislating, this is an abdication of legislative responsibility and a violation of the oaths taken by every legislator.)💥💢❗

In the opening of his 2006, book, “The House,” the historian Robert Remini wrote: “The United States House of Representatives is regarded by many as the finest deliberative body in human history. A grand conceit, to be sure. But one that is not far from the mark. It is an extraordinary instrument for legislating the will of the American people.”

Less than two decades later, the passage reads as comedy 🎭— or is a deeply depressing tragedy 🤢, depending on your lens.

*Buck is a contributing writer who worked for two Republican speakers of the House, John Boehner and Paul Ryan.

Donald Trump and MAGA Republican extremists sold Americans health care away to billionaires- irresponsible tax cuts are "blood money"

A big Trump bill, but ‘beautiful’ it is not❗- Echo opinion letter published in The Boston Globe: 

Benefactors of Donald Trump’s largesse are receiving blood money.

As Republicans twist themselves into unnatural positions to support Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful 🤢 Bill,” they must think about how many people, including children, will die* as a result. Rural hospitals will close, children will starve, and millions will lose their health insurance, all to pay for the tax cuts for the president’s billionaire friends. Do those receiving the lion’s share of Trump’s largesse not understand that it is blood money?

From Bruce Zabinsky in Waban, Massachusetts

Reported by BBC *'We are all going to die' - Senator's healthcare comment sparks a bruhaha row.  During a political town hall meeting in Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst addressed an audience member's concerns about reduced spending on Medicaid in Donald Trump's Big Beautiful 🤢 Bill Act by saying: "We are all going to die."💀❗

The Iowa Republican senator went on to post a tongue-in-cheek video from a cemetery saying she made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium "understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth".

The bill would require able-bodied recipients to work, participate in job training programs or volunteer for 80 hours a month in order to be eligible for Medicaid, a healthcare program for low-income Americans.

The measure will lower the number of people with healthcare by at least 7.6 million from the Medicaid changes, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Donald Trump with the hypocritical Republican cult administration are lying about the ugly tax bill! Hands Off Medicaid!

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times by Jackie Calmes (and The Los Angeles Times).

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is one big, ugly mess.

We’ve seen false advertising in naming laws before — the Democrats’ 2022, Inflation Reduction Act jumps to mind. 

Yet, no legislation has been as misbranded as the Republican tax and spending cuts that Donald Trump, the branding aficionado himself, is pushing along a tortuous path towards passage in Congress.

Trump’s appeal to many Americans has always been his purported penchant for “telling it like it is.” 

But, Trump is doing the opposite by labeling as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” 👽a 1,100 page behemoth that encompasses just about everything he can’t even try to do by unilateral executive orders — deeper tax cuts, more spending on the military and on his immigration crackdown and, yes, Medicaid cuts. His so-called beauty is a beast so frightening that ratings firm Moody’s saw the details last week, calculated the resulting debt and on Friday downgraded the United States’ sterling credit rating for the first time in more than 100 years. That likely means higher interest costs for the nation’s increased borrowing ahead.

And yet, in another example of the gaslighting at which Trump and his party are so adept, the White House and House Republican leaders dismissed the rebuke of their bill. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it would spur economic growth — the old, discredited “tax cuts will pay for themselves” argument. Speaker Mike Johnson said the Moody’s downgrade just proved the urgent need to pass the big, beautiful bill with its “historic spending cuts.” Which only proved that Johnson didn’t read Moody’s rationale, explaining that spending cuts would be far exceeded by tax cuts, thereby reducing the government’s revenues and piling up more debt.

The Republican Party, which postures as the fiscally conservative of the two parties despite decades of evidence to the contrary, would add about $4 trillion in debt over the next 10 years if its bill becomes law, according to Moody’s. Other nonpartisan analyses — including from the Congressional Budget Office, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania — similarly project additional debt in the $3-trillion-plus to $5-trillion range, more if the tax cuts are made permanent as Trump and Republicans want.

No surprise: Trump, after all, set a record for the most debt in a single presidential term: $8.4 trillion during Trump 1.0, nearly twice what accrued under his successor, President Joe Biden. Most of Trump’s first-term red ink stemmed from his 2017 tax cuts and spending, which predated the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s costly response.

“This bill does not add to the deficit,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted to reporters on Monday, showing yet again why such a facile dissembler was chosen to speak for the habitually prevaricating president.

“That’s a joke,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky responded.

Worse, it’s a lie. 🤥 And no surprise here, either, but Trump’s (tax) tariffs — another economic monstrosity that he’s declared “beautiful” 💥👺— aren’t paying for this bill, despite his claims. Yet the president repeated that falsehood on Tuesday (along with others), when he visited the Capitol to strong-arm Republican dissidents, including Massie, into supporting the measure ahead of a House vote. (Inside a closed caucus with House Republicans, the president reportedly called for Massie to be unseated; the Kentuckian remains opposed.)

“The economy is doing great, the stock market is higher now than when I came to office. And we’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariff money,” Trump told reporters at the Capitol. Every point a lie. 🤥

(This week provided yet more evidence that he’s utterly wrong to keep insisting that foreign countries pay his tariffs, not American consumers. After Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, said late last week that it would have to raise prices, Trump posted that it should ” ‘EAT THE TARIFFS.’ ” He added: “I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” This after a Walmart exec said that “the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb.”)

While details of the budget bill shift as Republican leaders dicker with their dissidents, here’s the ugly general outline, according to Penn Wharton:

Extending and expanding Trump’s 2017, tax cuts (for the rich❗💲), which otherwise expire this year, would cost nearly $4.5 trillion over 10 years, $5.8 trillion if the cuts are permanent. (Mandating that tax cuts expire after a time, as Trump did in 2017, is an old budget gimmick to understate a bill’s cost. The politicians know they’ll just extend the tax breaks, as we’re seeing now.) The bill’s proposed spending increases for the military, immigration enforcement and deportations would cost about $600 billion more.

Spending cuts over 10 years, mostly to Medicaid as well as to Obamacare, food stamps and clean-energy programs, would save about $1.6 trillion. That offsets as little as one-quarter of the cost of Trump’s tax cuts and added spending.

Also, the bill is inequitable. The tax cuts would disproportionately favor corporations and wealthy Americans. Its spending cuts, however, would mostly cost lower- and some middle-income people who benefit from federal health and nutrition programs. Changes to Medicaid, including a work requirement (92% of recipients under 65 already work full or part-time, according to the health research organization KFF), and to Obamacare would leave up to 14 million people without health insurance.

Penn Wharton found that people with household income less than $51,000, for example, would see their after-tax income reduced if the bill becomes law, and the top 0.1% of income-earners would get hundreds of thousands of dollars more over the next 10 years. Beyond that time, Penn Wharton projected, “all future households are worse off” given the long-term impact of spiraling debt and a tattered safety net.

“Don’t f — around with Medicaid,” Trump told Republicans at the Capitol, according to numerous reports. How cynical, given that he was pressuring them to vote for a bill that would do just that.

Jackie Calmes: is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.