Last chance to stop Trump’s class warfare budget bill

WASHINGTON—The American people have “one last chance to stop this job-slashing, health-care-gutting giveaway to the extremely wealthy from becoming law—but the vote is just hours away,” the AFL-CIO warned late Tuesday night.

After the Republican-run Senate—in defiance of strong public opposition—passed what the labor federation called President Donald Trump’s “big bad budget bill,” it urged everyone to bombard their congressional representatives with telephone calls urging a no vote on the final reconciliation version of the bill, which is now before the House.

“If you are one of the thousands of people who made a call already, we need you again right now,” the AFL-CIO emphasized. It posted a call-in number, 231-400-0602.

If the House passes the bill, it will be sent to Trump’s desk for his signature and become law, imposing damage that will last for generations.

 All 45 Democrats and both independents in the Senate voted against the measure Tuesday. So did Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C.

But foes of the 940-page monstrosity needed a fourth Republican to join them against the rest of the 53-senator GOP—and they didn’t get her. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voted for the measure, officially called a “reconciliation” bill, after winning key concessions.

That produced a 50-50 tie, and Vice President J.D. Vance, in his role as head of the Senate, cast the deciding vote. 

The bill has gone from the House to the Senate and now back to the House again for final approval after Senate Republicans rode roughshod over fiscal legislation rules in order to get it passed. The final vote in the House could come as soon as July 2 or 3.

Class warfare

The bill’s key features are a $4.5 trillion, 10-year tax cut for corporations and the 1%, plus massive cuts in Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, worker health and safety, education, and other domestic programs to pay for it. 

“This is a big, ugly, obscene betrayal of American working families that was rammed through the Senate in the dead of night to satisfy a president determined to hand tax cuts to his billionaire friends,” declared Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher.

“This is what class warfare looks like,” declared Faiz Shakir, co-founder of More Perfect Union.

The Communist Party USA said members of Congress must now answer the question: “Which side are you on?” The party slammed the “MAGA billionaire budget” for giving the ultra-wealthy and corporations a massive tax break while defunding critical programs.

“Millions will lose health coverage, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths each year and a loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Nearly 11 million would lose nutrition assistance, including more than three million children whose lives would be endangered,” the CPUSA pointed out. It took note of polls showing that four out of five people in the U.S. support raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations—not cutting them.

“Older Americans will watch” and remember “how you voted,” warned Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans.

“Each member of the House of Representatives must now make a choice between the well-being of their constituents and their corporate donors,” People’s Action Executive Director Sulma Arias said. “It’s either medicine for the sick and food for the hungry or tax cuts for billionaires and yachts for CEOs.”

Opinion polls show a majority of people in the U.S. dislikes the measure, and the more they hear, the more they hate it. The latest, a Quinnipiac poll published the morning of the final vote by ABC News, showed a 55%-29% margin against the bill. 

Every union leader who spoke out after the GOP-run Senate passed the reconciliation bill denounced it. 

“Senate Republicans claimed to stand with working people, then picked our pockets to deliver a nearly $5 trillion gift to billionaires. Every senator who voted for this budget bill chose to make working families poorer, sicker and less safe,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, leading the criticism, said. 

The Service Employees union warned lawmakers that voters would remember next November, when the bill’s cuts and their impact—higher food prices, higher energy costs, fewer dollars in the pockets of everyone but the very rich and struggling kids in schools—fully hit.

“Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP while giving tax breaks to the wealthy? This isn’t the American dream… It’s the American nightmare,” SEIU tweeted.

“People have rejected, in poll after poll, this bill’s brazen deception,” says the AFT’s Weingarten. “We will continue to sound the alarm and let those who voted for it know they have wounded the very people who voted them into office.”

All-out assault

It’s the bill’s attacks on health care that are garnering the harshest condemnation, particularly its targeting of Medicaid.

“Trump and Senate Republicans tried to hide the fact that they planned to cut Medicaid. We warned the public that they were lying, and after this vote, there can be no doubt,” People’s Action’s Arias said. 

Health experts have estimated that the House version of the bill passed in May could cause as many as 51,000 preventable deaths annually, with the Medicaid cuts alone causing nearly 30,000 additional deaths per year. The Senate version upped those numbers. 

Fiesta, of the Alliance for Retired Americans, said Tuesday night that “Senate leaders made crystal clear who they really care about—and it’s not older Americans.” He said: “No amount of accounting gimmicks, delays, or so-called ‘relief funds’ can hide what this bill does. 

“Fifty Senators joined Vice President Vance and voted to slash $1 trillion from Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act—while handing $1.3 trillion in tax breaks to people making more than $500,000 a year and adding $4 trillion to the national debt.

The millions of people who will lose their health coverage due to Medicaid cuts will end up seeking care in emergency rooms, the most expensive care around. Hospitals pass those ER costs to insurance companies, who pass them onto the rest of us in higher premiums: $500 more per person per year, and $2,000 yearly for a family of four, the AFL-CIO estimates.

On top of robbing the poor to give to the rich in the form of tax cuts, the bill also redirects money away from social needs toward militarization and deportations. Almost a quarter of the House’s original bill price tag was allocated for Trump’s mass deportation campaigns, according to the conservative Cato Institute. Much of those funds will end up in the hands of for-profit private prison corporations.

Job killer

Jobs are another target of the bill. Among those to be lost, according to various unions: 600,000 in health care, mostly as rural hospitals and Planned Parenthood clinics, also in rural areas, close. The hospitals will suffer from the $1.1 trillion cut in Medicaid money. The clinics will close because the “reconciliation” bill accomplishes a favorite GOP social issue goal, banning all money to Planned Parenthood, because clinic doctors perform abortions.

An uncounted number of public school jobs will be eliminated, as the bill includes $25 billion to set up a nationwide voucher program giving taxpayer dollars to parents of private school kids, taking money away from public schools, which educate 90% of U.S. children. 

The Senate “reconciliation” bill sent to the House also includes an 80% cut in money for schools with high shares of poor kids. Most of the private school parents are both rich and white. Public schools are 50% children of color. Again, the money that went to schools would now go for the tax cut for corporations and the 1%.

The Senate clawed back grants aiding the transition to a clean energy economy and upheld a rollback of clean energy and advanced manufacturing tax credits, said the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups. It estimated the budget bill “puts two million jobs within the country’s burgeoning clean energy manufacturing footprint at risk.

“With this vote, the GOP reaffirmed its deep commitment to screwing over workers in favor of appeasing Donald Trump and his billionaire friends,” said the group’s executive director, Jason Walsh. 

“At least 140,000 jobs in food processing facilities, school cafeterias, grocery stores, and farms” would be gone because the bill cuts $300 billion in SNAP funding, the AFL-CIO said. SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

An estimated 1.75 million construction jobs and over three billion work hours, which translates to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits, will be vaporized, according to North America’s Building Trades Unions and the Laborers.

Act now

“This budget bill is deeply unpopular for a reason,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders declared Wednesday morning as he urged his union’s members—and all working people—to join the last-ditch effort to stop Trump and the Republicans in Congress.

If passed, the class warfare budget would be the biggest upward transfer of wealth from working families to billionaires and big corporations in U.S. history, and, as so many have pointed out, it will cost lives and jobs. 

But, as Saunders emphasized, “this fight is not yet over.”

As the bill moves back to the House for final passage, there is still time, the AFSCME leader said, to “get organized and fight tooth and nail” to stop it—via phone calls, letters, lobbying visits, protests, and more.

No matter the outcome of the vote, it will also be necessary to keep people mobilized going forward—both to battle the bill’s impacts and make those who supported it pay a political price.

“We will organize to stop this MAGA murder bill in the House of Representatives,” People’s Action declared Tuesday night, and “we will organize to hold the members of the U.S. Senate and House accountable for their votes.”

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