Politics
The congressional majority has a priority. It would be really bad for their constituents.
The party’s dilemma will eventually come to a head.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
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Republicans are coming off of their best presidential election performance with low-income voters in recent memory. According to the (imperfect) 2024 exit polls, President Donald Trump won voters earning $50,000 or less, something he didn’t do in either his 2020 or 2016 campaigns. This is a landmark measure of the Trump era realignment, with lower-income, noncollege voters of all races moving toward the Republican Party, while college-educated, higher-income white voters migrate to the Democrats.
Republican governance, however, has not kept up with these changes.
After a chaotic, grinding effort Tuesday to corral the necessary votes, House Republicans barely passed a blueprint for their “one big, beautiful bill” containing much of Trump’s legislative agenda. It tees up their ability to use the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to enact a sweeping bill, along party lines, down the road.
The blueprint creates space for a mishmash of Republican priorities, like beefing up border security and boosting defense spending. But its core is the same old, same old: Cutting spending for programs that poor people rely on, and cutting taxes. It is, in other words, roughly the same agenda that Republicans sought in 2017, when Trump entered the White House for the first time, even though the party’s composition has changed significantly since then.
(To clarify: This process is a separate negotiation from the other major ongoing legislative effort—funding the government beyond March 14—that will require Democratic cooperation. It has its own problems.)
What House Republicans passed Tuesday is not the final bill achieving all of Trump’s big, beautiful successes. Instead, this measure gives various committees their marching orders: The Armed Services Committee has put together a plan for $100 billion in new defense spending; the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, which have immigration and border jurisdiction, get $200 billion to play with; the Education and Workforce Committee has to find $330 billion in savings; and so on. Once the House and Senate pass an identical blueprint, then the committees set about writing the final bill itself, and try to pass that.
All in all, the blueprint allows for $4.8 trillion in tax cuts and spending on other GOP priorities, while requiring at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts elsewhere. It also has a mechanism, at the conservative Freedom Caucus’ request, that if Republicans don’t reach $2 trillion in mandatory spending cuts over the next decade, then there’s less money allowed for tax cuts.
The most controversial element for Republicans is that the blueprint tasks the Energy and Commerce Committee with finding $880 billion in cuts. This powerful committee, once described as having jurisdiction over “anything that moves,