A Moment of Clarity
House Republicans unify to pass big, ugly payout to billionaires
House Speaker Mike Johnson promised Trump a vote on his tax and spending bill before Memorial Day. By moving quickly and avoiding town halls this spring, Republican leadership hoped folks back home would buy the branding that Johnson himself struggled to say with a straight face before agreeing to make it the actual name of the legislation.
We asked Speaker Johnson to at least pray with us and those who will be impacted by this bill before putting it to a vote. He did not find time for prayer, but he did find 215 House Republicans to vote for this immoral bill.
“The ‘America First’ agenda is wrapped up in this one big beautiful bill,” Johnson said with the enthusiasm of a door-to-door salesman. Who knows, maybe Johnson has come to believe his own hype. But now 215 Republican member of the House have put their name on this one big, ugly payout to billionaires.
The silly name was always a ploy to get the media to repeat the lies that Trump’s PAC is paying millions to put on TV in districts where Republicans know their constituents won’t benefit from this scam.
But no matter how much they repeat the propaganda and hold committee meetings in the middle of the night to avoid scrutiny, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office still runs the numbers on the impact that a massive re-write of the tax code will have on every American. Those numbers make it very clear what Republicans in the House voted for today.
This chart illustrates the House reconciliation package’s impact for two distinct groups of Americans.
We should be clear about who these columns represent. On the left is your child’s teacher who is also a single mother of three. It’s the man who makes your sandwich at your favorite lunch spot, the woman who bags your groceries, the Amazon warehouse worker who sleeps in his car between split shifts.
These are some of the hardest working and most moral people in this country. Despite the myths that racialize poverty, they are white, Black, Latino, Asian, and Native. They are in West Virginia and in the Mississippi Delta; in big cities and in small towns.
These are the people we called “essential workers” during the pandemic. But, according to another report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, House Republicans voted today for a bill that means each of them will take home, on average, $1000 less next year.
Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina crowed in her enthusiasm for this bill that “it is a clear, full-throated response to the millions of working men and women who believe that America is due for a serious course correction.” No doubt, poor and working people have been asking for a course correction for decades as they’ve watched corporate profits soar while wages stagnate and prices climb. But this is the full-throated response? A bill that cuts Medicaid and SNAP for poor and working people and slashes clean energy credits, even as it balloons the debt by giving hundreds of billions to corporations, military contractors, and the richest Americans?
On the other side, in what the CBO chart above calls the “highest decile,” are the billionaires who Trump invited into the Capitol rotunda to celebrate his inauguration, when everyone else was left out in the cold.
These are the people who’ve gained the most from the tax cuts that Trump promised would lead to unprecedented economic growth when he signed them into law in 2017. Their companies have seen massive profits, and their personal wealth has grown consistently as everyday Americans have struggled with inflation and the rising costs of groceries. The bill that passed the House today is a big, ugly payout to people who most Americans don’t believe have their best interest in mind.
In the weeks ahead, we have work to do to make sure this package doesn’t pass the Senate. Mary Harris talked with Rev. Barber today on the Slate.com podcast, “What’s Ahead” about how and why we’re working to build a moral opposition to this bill and the broader federal budget that is working its way through Congress in other pieces of legislation. You can listen here.
But today’s vote in the House offers a moment of clarity. Speaker Johnson has said that this package is what “America First” is about, and only two Republican House members voted in opposition (two didn’t show up at all; one voted “present” to signify that he would have preferred more cuts to Medicaid).
215 elected representatives have made clear which side they are on. Each of us must now decide which side we are on.
This is what we know: the poor and working people represented on the left side of the chart above—the people we’ve walked with and organized alongside in the Poor People’s Campaign—are the largest potential swing vote in this country. If people of conscience work with them to build a moral fusion coalition, we have the power to change the political calculus in this country in 2026 and beyond.
Yes, Johnson had the votes in the House to pass this bill today. But he is misusing power in a way that allows us to build the coalition we need to fundamentally reconstruct a democracy that works for all of us—to not just change who has the votes, but to change the agenda they are voting on. In a moment when the stakes are this clear, it’s time to organize and build together.
Thank you for your work and for sharing this informative explanation. As a teacher and a single mother of two children, who has worked hard all my life to learn and give back to my community, who has taught for 30 years, and who has children who are about to enter their college years, I wonder how we will continue. They may not be able to go to college in the United States and without an education, how can they contribute meaningfully to the needs their generation will face?
Thank you for your prophetic moral witness.