J. D. Vance has had to cast six tiebreaker votes so far in the Republican-controlled U. S. Senate, this time to advance legislation cutting a measly $9 billion in spending

 Vance casts Senate tiebreaker to advance Trump’s DOGE-inspired cuts

... This was Vance’s sixth tiebreaker in the Senate, following his deciding vote on July 1 to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ...

The GOP House bowed down and worshipped before the GOP Senate and voted for its reconciliation bill lock, stock, and barrel today at 2:30pm, including all the clowns of the House Freedom Caucus

The roll call vote is here.

The $36 trillion national debt will soar.

The interest payments on that debt were $639 billion fiscal year to date at the end of May, and they will soar, too.

The so-called fiscal conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus could have stopped this monstrosity, but they all backed down save for Massie and Fitzpatrick, and they aren't even members.

The entire House Freedom Caucus voted for it. 

 

 

House GOP can't agree to proceed to debating Senate reconciliation bill, vote stands at 206 Yea, 216 Nay (4 GOP against), with 10 GOP not voting

Yikes. 

Even if all not voting GOP vote Yea, there's a tie. Not good enough.

And moments ago Thomas Massie changed his Yea to Nay lol. 

 Trump’s megabill is in real trouble; House GOP leaders need to flip a ‘no’ vote to a yes

 

 

Senate reconciliation bill gives chipmakers like TSMC more tax credits while cutting Medicaid

 

Chipmakers get larger tax credits in Trump’s latest ‘big beautiful bill’ 

 

... Under the bill, passed by the Senate Tuesday, tax credits for those semiconductor firms would rise to 35% from 25%. That’s more than the 30% increase that had made it into a draft version of the bill. ... 

The new provisions expand on tax incentives under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided grants of $39 billion and loans of $75 billion for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing projects. ...

 

Medicaid cuts in Trump’s megabill will leave millions uninsured, threaten rural hospitals

... Recent changes to the bill would cut roughly $1.1 trillion in health-care spending over the next decade, according to new estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 

More than $1 trillion of those cuts would come from Medicaid, a joint federal and state health insurance program for disabled and low-income Americans, according to the CBO. The funding cuts go beyond insurance coverage: The loss of that funding could gut many rural hospitals that disproportionately rely on federal spending.

The CBO estimates that the current version of the bill would result in 11.8 million people losing health insurance by 2034, with the majority of those people losing Medicaid coverage. ...

Approximately 72 million Americans are currently enrolled in Medicaid, about one-fifth of the total U.S. population, according to government data. Medicaid is the primary payer for the majority of nursing home residents, and pays for around 40% of all births. ...

The US Senate's biggest phony, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, boasted he had enough votes to stop Trump's bill, but voted for it all three times in the end

 

 

The roll call votes are here, here, and here.

June 4, 2025, here:

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” as “immoral” and “grotesque,” and reiterated that he will vote against it unless his GOP colleagues make major changes.

“This is immoral, what us old farts doing to our young people,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” after sounding alarms that the massive tax-and-spending-cut bill would add trillions of dollars to national deficits.

“This is grotesque, what we’re doing,” Johnson said. “We need to own up to that. This is our moment.”

“I can’t accept the scenario, I can’t accept it, so I won’t vote for it, unless we are serious about fixing it,” he continued.

Johnson has been among the Senate’s loudest GOP critics of the budget bill that narrowly passed the House last month.

Johnson and other fiscal hawks have taken aim over its effect on the nation’s debt. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated later Wednesday that the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Johnson has proposed splitting the bill into two parts, though Trump insists on passing his agenda in a single package.

“The president and Senate leadership has to understand that we’re serious now,” Johnson said of himself and the handful of other GOP senators whose opposition to the bill could imperil its chances.

“They all say, ‘Oh, we can pressure these guys.’ No, you can’t.”

Republicans hold a narrow 53-47 majority in the Senate, so they can only afford to lose a handful of votes to get the bill passed in a party-line vote.

“Let’s discuss the numbers, and let’s focus on our children and grandchildren, whose futures are being mortgaged, their prospects are being diminished by what we are doing to them,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s comments came one day after Elon Musk ripped into the spending bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” that will lead to exploding deficits. The White House brushed aside Musk’s comments.

Johnson said Musk’s criticisms bolster the case against the bill.

“He’s in the inside, he showed … President Trump how to do this, you know, contract by contract, line by line,” Johnson said of Musk. “We have to do that.”

Johnson said his campaign against the bill in its current form is not a “long shot,” because he thinks there are “enough” Republican senators who will vote against the bill.

“We want to see [Trump] succeed, but again, my loyalty is to our kids and grandkids,” he said.

“So there’s enough of us who have that attitude that very respectfully we just have say, ’Mr. President, I’m sorry, ‘one, big, beautiful bill’ was not the best idea,” he added.

 

GOP coward Senator Lisa Murkowski today hopes the US House will fix the reconciliation bill she just voted for, just like GOP coward Rep. Chip Roy hoped in May the US Senate would fix the reconciliation bill he just voted for

 You can't make this up!

Cowards hope someone else will do what must be done.

Heroes do it themselves.

Vote Nay for once!

 

 

The dark side had to come to the rescue of Trump's reconciliation bill in the U.S. Senate THREE TIMES

 

 Vance breaks 50-50 tie as Senate passes GOP megabill after voting around the clock   

Vice President Vance cast the tie-breaking vote as Senate Republicans on Tuesday delivered a huge legislative victory for President Trump by passing his One Big, Beautiful Bill Act after hours of tense negotiations that lasted through the night. ... 

the three ties which J. D. Vance had to break

 

 

Trump is threatening to throttle Elon Musk's opposition to the bill in the US Senate, which still hasn't been voted on after 24 hours of debate, by deporting him

 

Words have a meaning, and Real Clear Politics wants you to think Donald Trump intimidated Senator Thom Tillis to disappear

NC GOP Senator Tillis Announces Resignation After Clash With Trump

Fox News is almost as bad:

 Thom Tillis announces retirement from Senate after clash with Trump 

The truth: ... The North Carolina Republican announced on Sunday that he would not seek reelection in the 2026 cycle. ...

Thom is still there, hopefully to vote Nay again today on Trump's big, ugly charade of a reconciliation bill, and will be there for eighteen more months, and there's not a damn thing Trump can do about it.

He will be a potent second potential Nay vote in the US Senate on everything with Rand Paul. 

 

Republicans are doing an end-run around the Senate parliamentarian to make novel use of the current policy baseline instead of current law, asserting a Democrat precedent from 2022

 Senate GOP declines to meet with parliamentarian on whether Trump tax cuts add to deficit

... Republicans, however, say that the parliamentarian doesn’t have a role in judging how much the tax portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would add to the deficit within the bill’s 10-year budget window or whether it would add to deficits beyond 2034.

They argue that Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has authority under Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act “to determine baseline numbers of spending and revenue.”

Ryan Wrasse, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), pointed to a Budget Committee report published when Democrats were in the majority in 2022 stating that the Budget Committee, through its chair, makes the call on questions of numbers, not the parliamentarian.

Graham received a letter from Swagel [CBO Director] on Saturday stating that the Finance Committee’s tax text does not exceed its reconciliation instructions or add to deficits after 2034 when scored on the “current-policy” baseline that Graham wants the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and CBO to use.

Taylor Reidy, a spokesperson for the Budget panel, asserted on the social platform X that “there is no need to have a parliamentarian meeting with respect to current policy baseline because Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act gives Sen. Graham — as Chairman of the Budget Committee — the authority to set the baseline.” ...

All you really need to know is that whatever these yokels end up passing, the country will be $50-$60 trillion in debt ten years from now because they spend too much and tax too little.

The U.S. Senate parliamentarian still has not ruled on the GOP's wacky current policy vs. current law baseline

The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017. 

The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.

I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.

 

 GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill

... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...

Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...

Democrats united under Hakeem Jeffries in the US House are the only ones in American politics above water right now

 US House Democrats voted unanimously against the Republicans' continuing spending resolution under -4.2 underwater Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (except for Democrat Jared Golden [ME-2], a Blue Dog Democrat who under ranked choice voting in Maine wins by being the second choice of people who voted for someone else).

Senate Minority Leader Democrat Chucky Schumer (-19.6) led eight other Democrats in the US Senate to pass the continuing spending resolution. 

Republicans are jumping the shark. Opposing that is popular. 

Democrats, are you listening?

This is brutal: A list of Senate Democrats who were all for last week's failed filibuster after they were against it

 In the first column are 30 Democrats who infamously voted to abolish the filibuster late in the evening on Jan 19, 2022, which failed 48-52 because of Sinema and Manchin, but happily tried to mount one last week.

The roll call vote in the US Senate is here (the Wikipedia entry is wrong on this, citing a CBS story and dating the vote to Jan 20).

In column two are 7 Democrats who campaigned to abolish the filibuster but who also happily tried to mount one last week.

The 2017 letter to Mitch McConnell in the last column references the names of 19 Democrats who then said they were for the filibuster, but last week 5 of them weren't lol.

The irony of all this of course is that Joe Biden's spending for fiscal 2025 was just passed with little modification by Republicans with the help of 10 Democrats (1 Independent) and the Democrats are beating themselves up over it.

But it's kind of hard to crow about Joe Biden's success after you just forced him out of power.

🤷

 

Republican Senator Mike Crapo is full of Orwellian crap, says extending the Trump tax cuts which increased deficits by $1.7 trillion won't keep increasing deficits

 

 If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase. 

-- Mike Crapo 

Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly $5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years. 

-- Oren Cass

Passing economic legislation through the US Senate can by-pass the 60-vote rule if the legislation does not increase deficits beyond 10 years. 

The total public debt has ballooned by over $16 trillion under the Trump tax cuts.

The do-nothing US Senate under John Thune has passed 0 of 5 appropriation bills passed by the US House under Mike Johnson who still hasn't passed the other 7 and now they all want to pass Biden's spending instead through FY2025 to please phony Republican Donald Trump

 

Trump's grifting, shape-shifting billionaire crypto czar David Sacks calls Zelenskyy a grifter lol

 

 David Sacks, a Jewish South-African, is another one of Trump's end-run-around-the-rules appointees like Elon Musk.

Like Musk he is one of Trump's "special government employees" who was not confirmed by the US Senate and who has not divested from all of his private business activities while he influences federal government policy. There is no government oversight of David Sacks.

Sacks licks his finger and checks the wind direction like the rest of his parasitical tech bro friends. He has made large political contributions in the past to the campaigns of both Mitt Romney and later to Hillary Clinton, as well as to RFK Jr., among others.

Like J. D. Vance, he believes in nothing very much except what's good for himself and his friends. "They are very rich people who want to buy political power", according to Edward Luce (below).

Sacks spews a litany of falsehoods about Zelenskyy and Russia's invasion of Ukraine here in an interview with the numbskull Jesse Watters. He has stated that Ukraine provoked the Russians to attack in 2022, a belief which Republicans booed last summer because it isn't true, according to Edward Luce of The Financial Times, who was there:

Sacks said on the opening night of the Milwaukee Republican convention, which I am also attending, that the US “provoked” Russia to invade Ukraine. As much as Sacks denies strenuously that he was booed by delegates. I beg to differ. The sceptical reception to Sacks’ Putin-friendly diatribe was the least unreassuring moment of what is the most dystopian political convention I have witnessed.

Trump appoints another election loser

 

Ex-Secret Service agent and conservative media personality Dan Bongino picked as FBI deputy director

... Bongino ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in 2012 and for congressional seats in 2014 and 2016 in Maryland and Florida, after moving in 2015. He lost the three races. ...

Kash Patel confirmed to FBI by the US Senate 51-49

 

Mitch McConnell, hated by ungrateful MAGA, won't run in 2026 after 40 years in the US Senate

 

Mitch McConnell announces he will retire, ending his decades-long Senate career

 

WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the longest-serving Senate leader in history, announced Thursday on his 83rd birthday that he won’t seek re-election next year, bringing an end to his four-decade career in the chamber.

McConnell, first elected in 1984, climbed his way up to the Senate Republican leader position in 2007 and remained there until early 2025, serving during four administrations in the majority and the minority. ...

McConnell supported Trump’s presidential bids in 2016 and 2020. He made a crucial decision in early 2021 to vote to acquit Trump on impeachment charges of inciting an insurrection, even as he blasted Trump as “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” calling his actions a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” Despite his misgivings, he went on to endorse Trump for president again 2024 after he clinched the Republican nomination for a third successive election. ...

McConnell oversaw Trump’s three Supreme Court confirmations during his first term, as part of a sweeping set of 234 judges inked over those four years — most of them young conservatives who will serve for generations — which he has regarded as his proudest achievement. ...

 

Senators Gary Peters of Michigan and Tina Smith of Minnesota have also announced that they will not run in 2026.

Maybe Democrats in the US House and Senate need to sue Elon Musk because they are the injured party

 Judge Tanya Chutkan correctly ruled that the Attorneys General who sued Musk demonstrated no harm to their states.

The interests of Congress are harmed, however, regardless of party, even if most Republicans are too stupid to realize it. Their constitutional prerogatives have been usurped. Being in the majority, however, and servile to Trump, Republicans don't care. Democrats, in the minority, have no other remedy. 

Of course this is partly a political matter, in which the court might refuse to meddle, and that is arguably correct. The remedy is political in that it is to be settled at the ballot box in two years. But that seems like an awful long time to wait for the system to correct itself, and it might not.

It might take a Democrat White House lording it over congressional Republicans in the minority in the future to demonstrate to them what they seem incapable of grasping now, but of course if this stands that will be too late for them to do anything about it.

What goes around comes around, in politics as in life.

What this really is is a constitutional matter. It is about the executive branch using a novel scheme to infringe on the powers specifically reserved to the Congress. Democrats should make that their case. The court system is the traditional place to adjudicate such things.

But given outright Democrat hostility to the constitution, e.g. to the Electoral College among other things, they may just not have the heart for it.

Sad!

 

Judge Chutkan rejects call from Democratic AGs for temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access to federal data

... But Chutkan said that the states hadn’t shown “that they will suffer imminent, irreparable harm absent a temporary restraining order.”

“The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for Plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents,” she wrote in the 10-page ruling. “It remains ‘uncertain’ when and how the catalog of state programs that Plaintiffs identify will suffer.”

Chutkan went on to say that even though the states’ larger case against Musk is “strong,” their arguments at this stage in the litigation were not good enough to satisfy the standard that must be met to warrant emergency action by the court.

“Plaintiffs raise a colorable Appointments Clause claim with serious implications. Musk has not been nominated by the President nor confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as constitutionally required for officers who exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,’” she wrote. “But even a strong merits argument cannot secure a temporary restraining order at this juncture.”...