Why They Did It

Their budget bill is terrible politics for Republicans. But there's something greater at stake for them.

The scene of the crime. (Photo by Pete Jordan, CC BY 2.0)

As I write this on Thursday morning, the final House vote to approve the Republican budget bill has not yet been held, but the outcome is clear. The far-right conservatives who spent the last few days lying about how they weren’t going to vote for the bill because of their deep concern for deficits have fallen into line, just as anyone who has paid any attention to Congress in recent years knew they would. The “moderates” from swing districts have likewise knuckled under to pressure from President Trump and their party’s leadership, providing just enough votes to pass this abomination.

While GOP members are gamely trooping to the TV cameras to insist that the trillions of dollars in deficits this bill creates will disappear if we shut our eyes real tight, and that the 17 million people who will lose their health coverage are contemptible malingerers who don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy, it’s hard to imagine they don’t know what a political disaster this will be for them.

They’ve seen the awful polls. They know that even in the best of circumstances the president’s party usually suffers a loss in the midterms. And they understand that despite their formidable propaganda machine, the practical effects of the bill will be nothing like what they’re claiming. Most of them sit in safe seats, their districts gerrymandered and their states comfortably red, but this will be very, very bad for the Republican Party as a whole, as all but the most delusional among them surely recognize.

So why are they doing this? One can certainly imagine a less radical version of this bill, one that moved in the same direction but not so far and fast, much as the legislation they passed in Trump’s first term did. That kind of bill might not be a political winner, but it wouldn’t be such a huge loser either. Why not go that route?

They’re not giving away their shot

The answer is that this isn’t about the politics, it’s about the substance. You don’t like weather-vane politicians, always checking the polls to see how they should vote? Well here you go. They are willing to take the political risk, even the certainty of future defeat, because they believe so strongly in what this bill does.

They despise Medicaid and have contempt for everyone who uses it. The same goes for SNAP, aka food stamps. They desperately want to cut taxes for the wealthy, and always have. They don’t just want to roll back Biden-era climate policies, they want to destroy the entire green energy and manufacturing sectors of the economy. Their hearts flutter excitedly at the sight of a gang of masked thugs pummeling a landscaper or arresting a 6-year-old with leukemia; the thought of spending $150 billion so ICE can seize millions of immigrants and cart them off to a network of brutal detention centers fills them with joy.

That’s just part of what’s in the bill, but the point is that this is the fulfillment of their fondest policy wishes. If it costs them their House majority and maybe even their Senate majority as well (a long shot, but not impossible), they’re willing to do it. Because they believe in it.

While we think of politicians as cynical operators who care only about reelection, that isn’t always true. In this case, Republicans have decided that they have an opportunity they may not have again for a long time, and if they’re going to suffer politically anyway, they might as well get as much policy change out of it as they can.

In many ways, this bill is truly revolutionary. There has never been this kind of assault on the safety net, and the damage will be so great that it will take Democrats years or even decades to undo the damage — if they can manage it at all. The same goes for what Republicans have done to the executive branch: Whether it was illegal to fire tens of thousands of employees and dismantle one agency after another, the damage is done. If Democrats want to try to rebuild America’s capacity for, for instance, providing foreign aid, they can try, but it won’t be easy. They can try to restore Medicaid after what this bill does to it, but that won’t be easy either. So if Democrats win back control in the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, they will have inherited a pile of rubble; they’ll have to expend all their energy just getting the government back to the imperfect place it was at in January of 2025.

Finally, Republicans may have decided that as much of a risk as it is to pass this bill, their future defeat is not guaranteed. They’ve always counted on the public’s ignorance, short memories, and susceptibility to demagoguery; who’s to say the formula the GOP has ridden to electoral victory in the past won’t keep working?

Sure, they know that the idea that upper-income tax cuts will explode economic growth is a lie, but it’s impossible to predict where the economy will be by 2028. Every Republican president since George H.W. Bush has presided over a recession, then handed things off to a Democrat who had to clean up the mess, yet people still see Republicans as the party that knows how to run the economy! Anything is possible.

And yes, they’ll almost certainly lose big in the midterms. But they’ve suffered midterm losses before and bounced back. There’s no reason to think they won’t again.

So while the short-term political outlook for Republicans is very bad, the more they look at the long term — in politics, but especially in policy — the better this bill looks. They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority. And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, “This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it.”

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