WASHINGTON—By just a single vote early Thursday morning, the MAGA-dominated House passed Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that slashes taxes for the wealthy and obliterates benefits for everyone else. Every Democrat, along with two Republican defectors and a single GOP abstainer, refused to give their support to the measure, leaving it to pass 215 to 214. It now heads to the Senate, and the White House is applying maximum pressure to force it through quickly.
But on the eve of the House vote, at least one of the progressive lawmakers and low-income workers who spoke at an outdoor press conference had a stark message for Congress about Trump’s bill and its $715 billion in Medicaid cuts:
People will die. And many, if not most, will be people of color.
One by one, people paraded to the microphone at a sun-splashed outdoor press conference on May 20 to denounce the legislation and advocate mass mobilization against it. Inside, earlier in the day, Trump apparently convinced wrangling House Republicans to bury their differences and unite behind his signature legislative package.
The measure features the Medicaid cuts along with a 10-year, $4.5 billion tax cut for the rich and corporations. One speaker, Rep. Spencer Lee, D-Pa., put the total corporate giveaways at up to $7 trillion. It also curbs aid to schools with poor kids, ends summer meal programs, and cuts supplemental food aid, called SNAP, for low-income pregnant people, newborns, and toddlers.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the bill, admitting that “in general, resources would decrease for households in the lowest decile (tenth) of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the highest decile.”
“People tell me they’re losing their loved ones” because health care clinics are already closing, declared Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. The closing clinics, starved for funds, are in majority-Black and brown areas of her Detroit-based district. Tlaib attributes a deliberate motive to the GOP bill’s Medicaid cuts. She predicts they’ll force more clinic closures.
“They don’t want to see these children reach the age of 1.”
Organized labor is united against the bill, too. The nation’s four biggest unions launched a radio ad campaign and a door-to-door blitz in 17 “swing” congressional districts in an attempt to convince enough Republican lawmakers to oppose the measure to defeat it. That effort, unfortunately, came up short.
“The House Republicans’ bill is a budget for the billionaires, plain and simple. While this leadership has tried to claim they’re the party of workers, they are pushing forward a bill that will cause historic levels of harm to working families,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said on May 20.
“It will throw millions of children, seniors, and families off their health care, gut funding for nursing homes and rural hospitals with devastating effects for care jobs, cut investments in jobs of the future, and push food assistance out of reach—all to give the rich and big corporations another tax cut.
“Provisions buried in this bill will take yet another swing at federal workers…. The bill also overrides state artificial intelligence rules that protect workers’ jobs, privacy, and civil rights, and grinds health and safety rulemaking to a halt. Any member of Congress who votes for this bill is voting to betray the working people of this country—and we won’t forget it.”
According to climate policy experts, the bill will also crush the clean energy sector of the economy, boosting carbon emissions and costing as many as 830,000 jobs.
Speakers at the press conference, co-led by the Color of Change organization, were blunter than Shuler.
“The Republicans are trying to cut Medicaid and SNAP so they can have the tax privileges of Elon Musk and Donald Trump,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., who convened the session.
Neither Trump nor Musk paid income taxes the last three years, another speaker said. They used deductions and tax breaks available to the rich, but no one else, to escape their fair share.
“They’ve targeted babies who need formula and Black and brown people,” added Pressley, whose Boston-centered district has a high proportion of Medicaid and SNAP recipients. “Twenty percent” of African-American families in her district need SNAP, she said, compared to 7% of whites.
“They are taking away our opportunity to survive,” said Pressley. The movement, she added, sees “the extent they are willing to go to accelerate this neo-segregationist agenda. Cruelty is the point, and Donald Trump is a dictator. The only way to beat a dictator is through defiance.”
The workers who spoke were just as direct.
“Sixty-four years ago, my mother was on public assistance, a single mom trying to raise three kids,” said David Nolley of Baltimore. SNAP provided food and Medicaid provided care, and now the kids—himself included—are grown and either working in or retired from good jobs. “This is not a hand up or a hand out, but an investment in America” and its future, such as his grandchildren, Nolley said.
“My mother paid into Medicaid, I paid into Medicaid, and my working children are paying into Medicaid,” said Angela Surratt. “This is my money, and I’m not going to let billionaires take it.”
The lawmakers and Color of Change focused on mass mobilization, using data, by congressional district, to drive home the massive negative impact of the measure on workers and the poor. Also addressed was the issue of insider lobbying.
“When Republicans line their pockets, it’s about who gets hurt,” said Pennsylvania’s Rep. Lee. Rep. Chantelle Brown, D-Ohio, pointed out exactly who some of those are who will be hurt: “People who have been locked out for decades by structural racism.”
And Lakeesha Ashley, who came to the press conference straight from her graduation with a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland, had a stark warning for everyone who wasn’t at the televised session outside the Capitol. “The only way we’ll beat this is to put a human face on what is being taken away,” said Ashley, a working mother who was still wearing her cap and gown.
“If they can do this to us in the dark of night,” she said of the massive reconciliation bill, its Medicaid and SNAP cuts, and its tax cut for the rich, “then what will they do to everybody in daylight?”
Tlaib signaled that there is no course other than continued resistance, saying, “We will not stop fighting to block this budget from being signed into law.”
CONTRIBUTOR
