President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on tax cuts, energy deregulation, and border security is in constant jeopardy and struggling to come together in the House — and a big part of why is the "impossible" demands Trump is heaping on GOP leadership for what should be in the bill, Hayes Brown wrote in an analysis for MSNBC.
The president, wrote Brown, "has managed to write a bunch of checks that he can’t cash on his own. It falls to congressional Republicans to make his dreams a reality — and they’re running up against stumbling block after stumbling block in the process. Even as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) attempts to wrangle his caucus into shape, Trump is doing little to help."
Trump has demanded a ton of extras tossed into the bill that only make it more expensive and harder to make revenue neutral, like eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security payments, as well as permanent enshrinement of his 2017 tax bill's temporary tax cuts on individual income.
The upshot, Brown continued, is that Trump "has been more of a carnival barker than a ringmaster for this legislative session, promising big results but offering little leadership. Even after the House Ways and Means Committee released the first preview of its plan on Friday night, it was still unclear what the final bill will look like or how much of the package Trump might ultimately sign off on."
One of the biggest stumbling blocks has been Trump's insistence that the bill will not cut Medicaid, even as the House GOP committed to finding $880 billion in savings from health and food aid — essentially impossible without huge cuts of some kind.
Republicans have floated various cuts disguised as non-cuts, but ruled out most of them. This weekend, they quietly unveiled their latest plan: a $715 billion cut that would throw more than 8 million people off the program, and it still appears to face GOP dissension.
With the House set to mark up the bill on Tuesday, Brown wrote, "when another president might be busy working the phones, trying to forge a cohesive vision for his fractious legislators, this president — whose whole reputation is built on the myth of his dealmaking prowess — appears to have staked out 'probably don’t do it, but OK if you do' as his position."
In other words, he concluded, "Trump is going to take credit for any positive parts of the bill and blame Congress for failing to do the impossible in achieving all of his expensive promises."