The phrase, from the former president of the Nancy Pelosi representatives, is famous in Washington: “In Congress we approve the laws, and then we read them.” Last Saturday, Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic minority in the United States Senate, invested the order of the factors by forcing, in a maneuver of parliamentary delay, that some suffered employees of the Upper House read aloud in the hemicycle for 15 hours the 940 pages of the revised and published version shortly before midnight on Friday.
The text – which contains the ambitious fiscal reform and spending proposal of Donald Trump and threatens to greatly increase a public deficit already runaway – was finally approved this Tuesday, after four days of agonizing discussion in the Capitol and by the hair. The Vice President’s tiebreaker vote was needed, JD Vance, who had reached the hemicycle a few hours earlier, in anticipation that the power that the Constitution was going to be needed to undo a draw, after three republican senators were opposed. The final result was, therefore, 51-50.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill”. He has pressed for his own in the Capitol to make heart guts to the cuts of the public benefits that will affect their voters and take it forward, and now he wants him to land at his direct table from the Capitol before the big party of Independence Day, which is held next Friday, July 4.
The thing seems unlikely: after the penalty of the Senate now goes to the House of Representatives, where it was approved in May by a single vote (215-214). And the drama does not look like loosening. The text has changed so much on the path that has to be discussed again, and several members of the lower house, belonging to the toughest wing of the Republican Party, traditionally contrary to the increase in public spending, already threaten not to support it.
In the Senate, all the Democrats (47), together with the three Discoles Republicans – Rand Paul (Kentucky), Thom Tillis (North Carolina) and Susan Collins (Maine) – opposed the approval of the BBB, a law that delves into the tax cuts approved in 2017, at the beginning of the first Trump administration. The standard also complies with promises of the Republican re -election campaign, such as the elimination of rates to tips, and allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to its mass deportation plan, as well as the priorities of the current administration in defense.
The text plans to counteract spending size with, among others, the cuts worth more than 900,000 million euros to Medicaid, something like a social security for people with lower and disabilities revenues, and the SNAP program, which is now called the food coupons distribution system. It will not be enough: according to calculations of the Congress Budget office, the BBB will add in the next 10 years about 3.3 billion to the American deficit, which currently amounts to 37 billion, a record fired from the pandemic.
Among the changes suffered in its passage through the Senate to content almost all of the creation of a fund of 25,000 million for rural hospitals or the elimination of exemptions for wind and lots, star measure of the previous administration.
Marathon of votes
The live reading left on Monday passed to something called the vote-o-rama, a marathon in which the text is last reviewed and proposals for change are made, which are approved or not. This time it lasted about 26 hours, until the news jumped that the leader of the conservative majority, John Thune (South Dakota) had gathered the necessary votes after an early morning infarction.
Discounted Paul’s support, which opposed the norm from the beginning, and Tillis, who considers the changes that the norm will bring to Medicaid and will leave 12 million people without coverage, all eyes perched on the undecided. Above all, in the Senator of Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, to which her classmates courted in the hemicycle more in tune with Trump while she obtained advantages and exceptions for her own. Nor was the view of Senator Josh Hawley (Misuri), who had flirted with an opposition that did not finally materialize.
Those changes of rebellion for the gallery were part of a show that was pure Washington. The reading of the 940 pages of the law provided images that looked like the reverse lacking the Washingtonian myth of James Stewart spent tirelessly in the classic of the political ideal of Frank Capra Knight without a sword (1937). A handful of suffered Senate employees turned to the task while their companions no longer knew how to sit in their chairs, and they thought, with a lost look, in their things, who knows if reviewing the list of slopes next week or ordering better to better the interpretations of Nicolas Cage.
At night, while senators’ assistants (staffers, In the jargon of the Capitol, a tribe of exploited workers in the name of a mixture of ambition and patriotism) called home to say that they would not wait for them awake, the television reporters sent the same chronicle again and again and juggled to keep the suspense and the food distributors at home put their motorcycles to the Capitol.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, made a stellar appearance as those actors to whom the scriptwriters of the series kill in a season and make them return from the beyond in the next as a phantant appearance of its protagonists: the richest man in the world, with his own history of criticism of the law by the effects that he can have on the public deficit, reproaches that led him to breaking sour and spectacularly On Saturday afternoon that the content of the retouched standard seems “completely crazy.”
On Monday, Musk threatened to support with his inexhaustible portfolio those who opposed the Republicans who vote yes to the BBB, even if that is, that is how dramatic he put on, how “the last one does” the businessman before he died. In addition, he fantasized again with the creation of a third game.
Trump did not lose, on the other hand, the opportunity to put on the gloves again and undertake it with blows. He suggested in a message in Truth to eat his own syrup: applying the scrutiny and cuts the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), in front of which the president put Musk with the commission of thinning the administration. with suspending subsidies to their companies, strongly dependent on public money. Speaking to the reporters in the White House, Trump, faithful to his Tabernary style, later warned: “The Doge monster can turn against Elon and eat it.”
Before, during the weekend, the US president had canceled his favorite plans for the weekend – passing him playing golf in one of the clubs of which he owns; In this case, in Bedminster (New Jersey) – to be able to dedicate the senators on Saturday and press them to approve the norm as soon as possible. That pressure also moved to Truth, a channel in which he sent the following message: “To all Republicans who cut expenses, among which I include me, remember: they still have to be reelected. Do not go crazy! We will compensate it, multiplied by 10, with growth with growth [económico]more than ever. ”
It is the new law of the Republican Party in these times: anyone who has opposed the leader is exposed to his fury and the risk of seeing how the leader of the Maga Movement (Make America Great Again) throws his hosts against them. In anticipation of that, Tillis, the North Carolina Senator, announced on Sunday that he will not appear to re -election, which was coming next year. Once that weight was removed, he became the greatest critic of the president and Circus of Washington during the four days of the negotiation of the law in the Senate, by denouncing in a speech in the hemicycle the “hypocrisy of American politics” and those who do anything to cling to their seats.
