The passage of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” further diminishes our faith in Congress, in part because of the weakness of the party out of power, but more so because the party in control of the House and Senate continues to cede its own power to the Executive Branch.
After all the promises from the president and key Republicans in Congress about how they would not touch Medicaid, nearly all of them approved a massive tax cut give-away to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the most needy in our nation.
The talk about how the cuts are only about rooting out fraud and abuse is just cover for pushing millions of Americans off of their health coverage as this legislation pushes this nation trillions of dollars deeper in debt.
The Democrats in the House and Senate demonstrated they can actually work together, as futile as that proved to be because they don’t have the numbers of their own to stop the legislation.
However, our real disgust lies with the Republican representatives.
Critics have targeted Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski for talking a big game about her unhappiness with the bill and its impact on the nation, then caving in to be that key 50th senator to support it after getting special consideration for her own constituents.
Her real fault was letting on how much she didn’t like the bill before voting for it.
Critics should target the rest of the Republican senators and congress members who all fell in line, including the small minority who wanted spending cuts to go even deeper. Only three GOP senators and two representatives voted against the bill.
We already have a conservative-stacked U.S. Supreme Court that has shown little willingness to rein in the executive order madness of this administration that is bypassing and usurping Congress’s authority. The court won’t even put a halt to clearly unconstitutional administration orders such as the attack on birthright citizenship.
The court’s failure to rule against the administration has shown a severe weakening of one of the pillars of our federal government. There are supposed to be three co-equal branches that act as checks and balances on each other. If there were a three-sided scale, instead of the two of justice, we’re watching the Supreme Court step off of its side.
And Congress’s abdication of its checks-and-balances power seems worse as it slips off the scale altogether.
Trump didn’t even win a simple majority of the popular vote, gaining 49.81 percent to Kamala Harris’s 48.34 percent, but he was duly elected. That was far from a mandate, but with the narrow GOP majorities in the House and Senate, Americans should have expected a conservative agenda.
What they shouldn’t have expected is the complete subservience of all of those Republican senators and congress members. We did expect that of our congressman, U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, because he pledged his subservience when he switched parties and proclaimed his undying loyalty to Trump during the president’s first term.
Van Drew kneecapped himself in service to getting re-elected in this conservative district, but where are the brave conservative Republicans who want a voice in shaping the future of the country? That doesn’t mean fighting the president tooth and nail like they did former Democratic President Joe Biden – and what Democratic legislators are doing with Trump – but it should mean showing they’re brave enough to stand up for the American people.
Fighting for tax cuts is a Republican credo, but why weren’t they fighting for more tax cuts for the middle class and not to the top 1 percent? Where were the deficit hawks to push back against adding trillions to the national debt?
President Trump operates by threat – threatening trading partners with tariffs, threatening federal judges who block his orders, threatening immigrants and threatening members of his own party with primary challengers if they don’t do what he says.
The president is creating the imbalance in the separation of powers.
The Republicans who control Congress should show some spine and demand to be part of the equation. These Republicans were elected to be the representatives of the people and should help to set and modify the agenda, rather than fall cravenly in line out of fear.
It is impossible to know what is going to happen with the mid-term elections next year and whether Republicans will lose their power in the House and/or Senate. If they do, it would be in part because voters decide it is hard to respect legislators who aren’t brave enough to represent them.