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    ‘This isn’t just about Trump’: the Rev William Barber arrested after prayer-protest against Republican-led budget

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    A police officer’s sense of timing seemed to illuminate the Rev William Barber’s moral mission with startling clarity.During a prayer vigil on Monday in the Capitol Rotunda, close to the very heart of US democracy, Barber was lamenting that Congress starts each day with its own prayers to the Almighty even while preying on the poor. A Capitol police captain, John Hersch, serendipitously choose that very moment to intervene.“Your activity right now is taking the form of a demonstration,” Hersch told Barber and an accompanying gathering of clergy. “It is unlawful to demonstrate in the Capitol Rotunda. If you do not cease your demonstration at this time, there is a possibility you will be placed under arrest.”Moments later, after two further warnings, Barber and seven accomplices – standing in front of the portrait of three 19th-century women’s suffrage campaigners – were arrested as police sealed off the Rotunda.The arrests marked the climax of the latest Moral Monday protest organised by Repairers of the Breach, a group founded by Barber that’s trying to derail Donald Trump’s planned tax and spending bill on the grounds that it will slash vital health and social services to lower-income Americans.It was the third Moral Monday Barber had led at the Capitol since April – and the third time he and his cohorts had been arrested.Barber, a social activist and founding director of Yale Divinity School’s centre for public theology, had earlier led a rally outside the US supreme court attended by an estimated 2,000 protesters.As a band belted out gospel songs, demonstrators held signs with slogans such as “Slashing the safety net is moral murder” and “Don’t cut Snap for 40 million poor people.”Wearing a white robe emblazoned with the words “Jesus was a poor man,” Barber – the son of civil rights workers who campaigned for racial desegregation – enjoined demonstrators to crusade against legislation that the US president has termed his “big, beautiful bill” and deemed essential to extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire this year.The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill last month by a single vote, 215 to 214. It now goes forward to the Senate against a chorus of criticism over its potential impact on the most vulnerable.Passage would result in 13.7 million people losing access to Medicaid and health insurance, Barber said.“This bill represents the worst kind of evil, which is the love of money … the root of all evil,” he said “This isn’t just about Trump. Two hundred and fifteen Republicans in the House voted for this bill – and now every senator is going to decide whether they’re going to vote for the ‘we’re all going to just die’ approach to politics.”Barber was referring to remarks by Joni Ernst, a Republican senator for Iowa, who faced criticism for telling a town hall last week that “we’re all going to die” after a constituent warned that health cuts could result in some people dying.Ernst doubled down by issuing a mock “apology” filmed in a cemetery, saying: “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.”Barber compared Ernst’s rhetoric with justifications used by slaveowners.“That’s the same language that slave masters used to tell slaves,” he said in an interview. “They would say: ‘Don’t fight for freedom, but believe in Jesus so that in the eternal life …’“It’s so cynical. What she said was one of the most contradictory misinterpretations of faith I’ve ever heard. It’s theological malpractice.“As Dr [Martin Luther] King once said, we’re not talking about over yonder. We’re talking about over here and people need healthcare over here. People need food over here. For her to bring up religion and bring up Jesus – if Jesus did anything, he provided everybody he met free healthcare. He never charged a leper, or a sick person, or a blind person, for their healing.”The Moral Monday protests have been adapted from similar demonstrations Barber started in North Carolina in 2013, following the election of rightwing Republican Pat McCrory as governor. The protests lasted two years, recalled Barber, resulting in thousands of arrests for civil disobedience but also spurring thousands more to register to vote.As protests against Trump ramp up, Barber is vowing to make Moral Mondays a regular feature of the landscape of dissent.“Moral Monday is not a one-time event,” he said. “If this budget passes the way it is, it will have a negative impact on this country for 10 years. It could possibly not be fully reversed for up to 50 to 60 years. This is serious business.”The protests are likely to expand to encompass a broader pro-democracy agenda. “Our role is not just the budget passing or not passing, but mobilizing poor and low-wage folk. We stand against any attacks on voting rights, on public education, [or] on healthcare,” said Barber.“Poor and low-wage people now represent 30% of the electorate in this country, and in battleground states, over 40%,” he said, making them the largest potential expansion for voting power in the country.In an acknowledgment of Moral Monday’s growing significance, this week’s rally was addressed by Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the progressive Indivisible movement, which spearheaded nationwide Hands Off protests in April that drew millions of participants.Levin praised protesters for having the courage to overcome fear.“People see us organized, and they say, wow, you are fearless,” he said. “Oh no. If you are fearless in this moment, you’re not paying attention. The authoritarians over there, they’re taking over our democracy.”But congressional Republicans, too, felt fear, he said. “They are projecting strength right now. They’re acting as if this is inevitable. They’re acting as if they have the power, you know, passing a bill through the House in the middle of night. [But] that’s not strength, pushing it through before the public can comment on it“The truth is, they’re terrified. They are terrified their voters are going to see what they’re doing. They’re terrified they’re going to lose their majority. And you know what? They should be terrified.” More

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      Some House Republicans Have Regrets After Passing Trump’s Domestic Policy Bill

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      The sprawling legislation carrying President Trump’s domestic agenda squeaked through the House with one vote to spare, but some Republicans now say they didn’t realize what they voted for.When Republicans muscled their sweeping domestic policy bill through the House by a single vote after an overnight debate, they breathed a sigh of relief, enjoyed a celebratory moment at sunrise and then retreated to their districts for a weeklong recess.Not even two weeks later, the victory has, for some, given way to regret.It turns out that the sprawling legislation to advance tax and spending cuts and to cement much of President Trump’s domestic agenda included a raft of provisions that drew little notice or debate on the House floor. And now, Republicans who rallied behind the bill are claiming buyer’s remorse about measures they swear they did not know were included.Last week, Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska admitted during a town hall meeting in his district that he did not know that the bill would limit judges’ power to hold people in contempt for violating court orders. He would not have voted for the measure, he said, if he had realized.And as lawmakers returned to Washington on Tuesday after their weeklong break, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said that she had been unaware that the mega-bill she voted for would block states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade.“Full transparency, I did not know about this section,” Ms. Greene posted on social media, calling it a violation of states’ rights and adding that she “would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”The remorseful statements highlighted the realities of legislating in the modern age. Members of Congress, divided bitterly along partisan lines and often working against self-imposed political deadlines, have become accustomed to having their leaders throw together huge pieces of legislation at the very last moment — and often do not read the entirety of the bill they are voting on, if they read any of it at all. At the same time, the polarization of Congress means that few pieces of legislation make it to the floor or to enactment — and the few “must pass” bills that do are almost always stuffed full of unrelated policy measures that would otherwise have little hope of passing on their own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk calls Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ tax bill a ‘disgusting abomination’

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      Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has opened a new rift with Donald Trump by denouncing the US president’s tax and spending bill as a “disgusting abomination”.Musk’s online outburst could embolden fiscally conservative Republican senators – some of whom have already spoken out – to defy Trump as they continue crucial negotiations on Capitol Hill over the so-called “one big, beautiful bill”.“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on his X social media platform on Tuesday. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”Musk, who had previously voiced criticism of the proposed legislation, quipping that it could be big or beautiful but not both, added on X: “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”He continued: “Congress is making America bankrupt.”A top donor to Trump during last year’s election campaign, Musk departed the White House last week after steering its so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) with the stated mission of slashing fraud and abuse within federal departments. He has argued that the Republican bill will undermine Doge’s work and drive the US further into debt.On Tuesday, Musk drew immediate support from Thomas Massie, one of only two Republicans who last month voted against the bill in the House of Representatives. “He’s right,” Massie responded on X.But there was a rebuke from Mike Johnson, the House speaker, who said he had spoken with Musk by phone on Monday for more than 20 minutes, making the case that the bill achieved campaign promises while making permanent massive tax and spending cuts.Johnson told reporters: “With all due respect, my friend Elon is terribly wrong about the One Big Beautiful bill. It’s a very important first start. Elon is missing it … I just deeply regret he’s made this mistake.”John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, was more diplomatic, saying: “So we have a difference of opinion. He’s entitled to that opinion. We’re going to proceed full speed ahead.”Having narrowly passed the House, the bill is now under consideration in the Senate, which is aiming to pass a revised version by 4 July. Some Republican fiscal conservatives, such as senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, share Musk’s concerns about the need for significant spending cuts.Johnson told CNN: “We have enough [holdouts] to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”Trump has previously dismissed Republican dissenters as “grandstanders” and urged them to get onboard. His influence proved decisive in quelling a potential rebellion in the House. On Monday he wrote on his Truth Social platform: “So many false statements are being made about ‘THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’.”The White House acknowledged Musk’s stance but said it has not changed its position on the bill. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill. It doesn’t change the president’s opinion: this is one big, beautiful bill and he is sticking to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe bill extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and includes new spending for border security and the military. Republicans aimed to offset these costs with cuts to programmmes such as Medicaid, food stamps and green-energy tax credits.Projections from the Congressional Budget Office and independent analysts indicate that the bill would add between $2.3tn and $5tn to the deficit over the next 10 years. White House officials contend that the economic growth generated by tax cuts will offset the increased spending.Russ Vought, director of the office of management and budget, told CNN: “This bill doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt. In fact, it lowers it by $1.4tn.”But Democrats have warned that the budget would raise the cost of healthcare for millions of people, and cause millions to lose coverage, in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. A new analysis by Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania found that it could lead to more than 51,000 preventable deaths.Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said in a floor speech on Tuesday: “Donald Trump and his so-called ‘big, beautiful bill’ is ugly to its very core. Behind the smoke and mirrors lies a cruel and draconian truth: tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy paid for by gutting healthcare for millions of Americans.”Later, responding to Musk’s intervention, Schumer commented on X: “I didn’t think it was imaginable but … I AGREE WITH ELON MUSK.”Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, added in a post: “Musk is right: this bill IS a ‘disgusting abomination’. We shouldn’t give $664 billion in tax breaks to the 1%. We shouldn’t throw 13.7 million people off of Medicaid. We shouldn’t cut $290 billion from programs to feed the hungry. Let’s defeat this disgusting abomination.” More

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      Trump’s tax bill helps the rich, hurts the poor and adds trillions to the deficit | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      The blush is off the rose, or, rather, the orange. The erstwhile “First Buddy” and born-again fiscal hawk Elon Musk recently said he was “disappointed” by Donald Trump’s spendthrift budget currently under debate in the US Senate. Squeaking through the House of Representatives thanks to the capitulation of several Republican deficit hardliners, this “big, beautiful bill” certainly increases the federal debt bigly – by nearly $4tn over the next decade.Equally disappointed are those who have been busy burnishing Trump’s populist veneer. Steve Bannon had repeatedly promised higher taxes for millionaires, but he has confessed he’s “very upset”. That’s because the bill would cut taxes by over $600bn for the top 1% of wage-earners, also known as millionaires. It amounts to the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.Yet this double betrayal will do nothing to impede the sundry Maga apparatchiks’ breathless support for their dear leader. Musk has already tweeted his gratitude to the president for the opportunity to lead Doge (that is, slash funding for cancer research). So this bill has once again proven Republicans’ willingness to relinquish their convictions as long as they can keep their grasp on power. And for Trump, it has reaffirmed that his pledged golden age is really just a windfall for the uber-wealthy like him. Now there can be no mistaking that Republicans’ governing philosophy is neither conservatism nor populism but unabashed hypocrisy.Expecting the self-proclaimed King of Debt to balance the budget – or hoping workers would be protected by the billionaire whose personal motto is “You’re fired” – was always imaginative thinking at best. In his first term, Trump added $8tn to the national deficit. Even excluding Covid relief spending, that’s twice as much debt as Joe Biden racked up during his four years in the White House. Almost $2tn of that tab came from Trump’s vaunted tax cut, which delivered three times more wealth to the top 5% of wage earners than it did to the bottom 60%. Nor did its benefits trickle down, with incomes remaining flat for workers who earn less than $114,000.Trump’s disingenuousness on the deficit continues a hallowed Republican tradition. All four Republican presidents since 1980 have increased the federal debt. By combining reckless militarism with rampant corporatism, George W Bush managed to balloon it by 1,204%. When Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill expressed concern about that spending, Dick Cheney, the then-vice president, reportedly retorted: “Deficits don’t matter.”Except, of course, when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. During his campaign for the US Senate in 2022, JD Vance derided Biden’s signature $1tn infrastructure package as a “huge mistake” that would waste money on “really crazy stuff”. Like improving almost 200,000 miles of roads and repairing over 11,000 bridges across the country.Apparently less crazy, but certainly more callous, are the vertiginous cuts to the social safety net proposed in Trump’s current budget bill. Its $1tn evisceration of Medicaid and Snap would leave 8 million Americans uninsured and potentially end food assistance for 11 million people, including 4 million children. When the Democratic Representative Ro Khanna introduced an amendment to maintain coverage for the 38 million kids who receive their healthcare through Medicaid, Republicans blocked it from even receiving a vote.But for all the budget’s austerity, it also provides $20bn in tax credits to establish a national school voucher program. And equally outrageous are its provisions that have nothing to do with the pecuniary, from easing regulations on gun silencers to hamstringing the power of courts to enforce injunctions.Perhaps most breathtaking of all, though, is how shamelessly the bill enriches the already mega-rich. In its first year, its tax breaks will grace Americans in the top 0.1% of the income bracket with an additional $400,000, while decreasing the earnings of people in the bottom 25% by $1,000. In other words, those who can least afford it are financing relief for those who least need it.When the 50% of working class Americans who broke for Trump in last year’s election realize they voted for a pay cut, they might begin to feel a bit disillusioned with the crypto trader-in-chief. They might even feel pulled to the authentically populist vision outlined by the progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their nationwide Fighting Oligarchy Tour.In the meantime, it is almost an inevitability that Republican senators will wring their hands before pressing the green button to vote “yea.” Josh Hawley has called the budget bill “morally wrong and politically suicidal”, criticism which Trump has previously mocked as “grandstanding”. The insult contains a typically Trumpian flash of psychological insight, because Hawley and his colleagues will no doubt do exactly what their counterparts in the House have already done – cave.Once Trump has scribbled his oversized signature onto the bill, his vision for the US will have become unmistakable. Try as they might, not even the spinmeisters at Fox News will be able to deny that he runs this country the way he ran his Atlantic City casinos, leading working Americans to financial ruin while he emerges all the richer for it.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a contributor to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      US budget chief calls fears that cuts to benefits will lead to deaths ‘totally ridiculous’

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      The White House budget director Russ Vought on Sunday dismissed as “totally ridiculous” fears expressed by voters that cuts to benefits in the huge spending bill passed by the House will lead to premature deaths in America.Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill act, now awaiting debate in the US Senate, will slash two major federal safety net programs, Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries, which will affect millions of people if it becomes law.Vought, director of the office of management and budget (OMB) and a key figure in Project 2025, the rightwing manifesto created to guide a second Trump term, defended the bill in an appearance on CNN on Sunday morning, also defending the lacerations to the federal workforce under Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).Vought was asked about a town hall meeting in Iowa last week hosted by the senator Joni Ernst where, when fielding questions about proposed cuts to Medicaid, a constituent yelled out that as a result people were going to die.Ernst responded, to jeers: “People are not – well, we all are going to die. For heaven’s sakes, folks.”Then, after the exchange went viral online, she posted a sarcastic non-apology video on Saturday, saying: “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So I apologize. And I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”When Vought responded on CNN’s State of the Union politics show about such concerns over cuts to health insurance and grocery subsidies leading to premature deaths, he said: “It’s totally ridiculous. This is ‘astroturf’. This bill will preserve and protect the programs, the social safety net, but it will make it much more commonsense.”Astroturfing is slang for pretending criticism is coming from the grassroots when, in fact, it is being orchestrated by interested parties.Some advocacy groups have said loss of Medicaid insurance and food stamps will cause great hardship.“These cuts won’t just hurt – they will kill,” the head of the Ohio Nurses Association said, while the American Academy of Pediatrics said the bill would result in “hungry kids” and impossible choices for many families. The American Hospital Association has warned that rural hospitals could close.On the same CNN show on Sunday, the senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, condemned Vought’s and Ernst’s remarks, saying: “Everyone would rather die in old age than at 40.” Murphy said people losing health insurance in order to continue tax cuts for the richest would lead to more deaths and that the bill is “an absolute disaster” and will add to the US deficit.“It’s just unreal the amount of gaslighting this administration is doing,” he said.Fellow Democrat and Georgia senator Raphael Warnock told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that he is in favor of work but that a work-reporting requirement in the bill, as a condition of Medicaid, “is very good at kicking people off their healthcare coverage, it’s not good at incentivizing people to work”. He added that if passed, the legislation would result in “a workforce that’s sicker and poorer” and damage to the US economy.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, who got the bill through the chamber last month but faces a greater challenge from some fellow Republicans in the Senate, told NBC that the bill does not include cuts to Medicaid but instead would strengthen the system and result in reductions in “fraud, waste and abuse”.The House minority leader and New York Democratic representative Hakeem Jeffries predicted that the bill would not pass the Republican-controlled Senate.“Hospitals will close, nursing homes will shut down and people will literally die,” he warned. More

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      in Elections

      Charles B. Rangel: A Life in Pictures

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      Charles B. Rangel died Monday at age 94, leaving behind a larger-than-life legacy in Harlem, his birthplace and longtime home, which he represented in Congress for more than four decades.To veterans, friends and Harlem residents who gathered on Monday for a Memorial Day lunch at American Legion Post 398, a few blocks from his home, he was just Charlie: a onetime member of the Legion post, a political powerhouse who always made himself accessible to his constituents.Nadine Pittman, a longtime American Legion Auxiliary member and a lifelong Harlem resident, described Mr. Rangel as “down-to-earth with the people.”“He’d take the time and talk to you,” Ms. Pittman said. “I loved him as a person.”Mr. Rangel retired as the ninth-longest continuously serving member of the House of Representatives in U.S. history. He was part of a quartet of venerable Harlem politicians known as the Gang of Four.Mr. Rangel was born and raised in Harlem and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx until he dropped out to join the Army in 1948. He fought in the Korean War and was awarded a Bronze Star for valor after leading his all-Black unit to safety.Mr. Rangel was elected in 1966 to the State Assembly. In 1970, he was voted into Congress, unseating Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a longtime incumbent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charles Rangel, former Harlem congressman, dies aged 94

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      Former US congressman Charles Rangel of New York, an outspoken, gravel-voiced Harlem Democrat who spent nearly five decades on Capitol Hill and was a founding member of the Congressional Black caucus, died on Monday at the age of 94.His family confirmed the death in a statement provided by City College of New York spokesperson Michelle Stent. He died at a hospital in New York, Stent said.A veteran of the Korean war, Rangel defeated legendary Harlem politician Adam Clayton Powell in 1970 to start his congressional career. During the next 40-plus years, he became a legend himself – dean of the New York congressional delegation, and, in 2007, the first African American to chair the powerful House ways and means committee.He stepped down from that committee amid an ethics cloud, and the House censured him in 2010 after a House ethics committee conducted a hearing on 13 counts of alleged financial and fundraising misconduct over issues surrounding financial disclosures and use of congressional resources. He was convicted by Congress of 11 violations, but he continued to serve in the House until his retirement in 2017.Rangel was the last surviving member of the Gang of Four, Black political figures who wielded great power in New York City and state politics. The others were David Dinkins, New York City’s first Black mayor; Percy Sutton, who was Manhattan borough president; and Basil Paterson, a deputy mayor and secretary of state of New York.Rangel’s distinctive gravelly voice and wry sense of humor made him a memorable character not just in politics but in the rest of his life and environs.The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, paid tribute on X, calling Rangel a “great man, a great friend, and someone who never stopped fighting for his constituents and the best of America”.“The list of his accomplishments could take pages, but he leaves the world a much better place than he found it,” Schumer posted.The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, also praised Rangel.“Charlie Rangel was a phenomenal patriot, hero, statesman, leader, trailblazer, change agent and champion for justice,” he posted on X.Jeffries, a fellow New Yorker, called Rangel “the Lion of Lenox Ave”, an iconic street at the heart of Harlem, and said he was a transformational force of nature.“Harlem, NYC & America are better today because of his service. May he forever rest in power,” Jeffries posted.Rangel was known for fiercely looking out for his constituents, sponsoring empowerment zones with tax credits for businesses moving into economically depressed areas and developers of low-income housing.“I have always been committed to fighting for the little guy,” Rangel said in 2012.He was known as one of the most liberal representatives in the House, loudest in opposition to the Iraq war, which he branded a “death tax” on poor people and minorities. In 2004, he tried to end the war by offering a bill to restart the military service draft. Republicans called his bluff and brought the bill to a vote. Even Rangel voted against it.A year later, Rangel’s fight over the war became bitterly personal with the then US vice-president, Dick Cheney, Republican president George W Bush’s running mate and a prime defense hawk.Rangel said Cheney, who has a history of heart trouble, might be too sick to perform his job.“I would like to believe he’s sick rather than just mean and evil,” Rangel said. After several such verbal jabs, Cheney hit back, saying Rangel was “losing it”.The Harlem lawmaker first entered the House in 1971. In 1987, Congress approved what was known as the “Rangel amendment”, which denied foreign tax credits to US companies investing in apartheid-era South Africa, where the wealthy ruling white minority held power by heavily oppressing the Black majority.Rangel was born on 11 June 1930. During the Korean war, he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.A high school dropout, he went to college on the GI Bill, getting degrees from New York University and St John’s University School of Law.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Top Republicans threaten to block Trump’s spending bill if national debt is not reduced

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      Donald Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US Senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”.Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence as a fiscal hardliner with the Tea Party movement, issued the warning to the president on Sunday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether his faction had the numbers to halt the bill, he replied: “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”Trump has invested a large portion of his political capital in the massive package. It extends the 2017 tax cuts from his first administration in return for about $1tn in benefits cuts including reductions in the health insurance scheme for low-income families, Medicaid, and to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food stamps.The bill squeaked through US House by just one vote on Thursday. It now faces a perilous welcome in the upper legislative chamber.Sunday’s admonitions from prominent senators angered by the failure to address the budget deficit bodes ill for Trump’s agenda given the tightness of the Republicans’ congressional majorities. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, can afford to lose only three votes from among his party’s 53.Thune has indicated that changes to the bill might be needed to bring refuseniks on side. That in turn could present the House speaker, Mike Johnson, with a headache.The House will have to approve any changes made in the Senate under the process of budget reconciliation, which allows spending packages to be fast-tracked through Congress avoiding a Senate filibuster of 60 votes. The final contents of the bill will need to be blessed by both chambers, with Democrats almost certain to vote unanimously in opposition.The House speaker renewed his plea to his Senate colleagues on Sunday to go lightly with him. He encouraged them on CBS News’s Face the Nation “to make as few modifications as possible, remembering that I have a very delicate balance on our very diverse Republican caucus over in the House”.But Senate budget hawks do not appear to be in the mood for compromise. Ron Johnson estimated that the bill would add up to $4tn to the federal deficit, a calculation that is broadly in line with the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).Johnson added a rare note of personal criticism of Trump from a congressional Republican. He said that while Trump might not be worried about the national debt, “I’m extremely worried about that.”He added: “We are mortgaging our children’s future. It’s wrong. It’s immoral. It has to stop.”Another key Tea Party senator, Rand Paul from Kentucky, has also been vocal over the deficit. He laid into the spending cuts contained in the big beautiful bill, telling Fox News Sunday that in his view they were “wimpy and anemic” and would “explode the debt”.Other influential Republican senators have been expressing concern about the number of Americans who would lose access to health coverage as a result of the legislation’s cuts to Medicaid. According to the CBO, almost 8 million people would be thrown off the benefit.Speaker Johnson tried to dismiss the concern, telling CBS News that 1.4 million of those vulnerable people were “illegal aliens receiving benefits” – and a further 4.8 million were able-bodied individuals choosing not to work and “gaming the system”.An analysis by the non-partisan FactCheck.org found that the claim that 1.4 million undocumented migrants were on Medicaid was false. People living in the US without immigration papers are not eligible for the federal program other than to receive emergency medical treatment.More than 1 million undocumented immigrants are in danger of losing health benefits as a result of Trump’s cuts – but this assistance is provided by states and has nothing to do with Medicaid.Any reduction in Medicaid would be politically awkward for Trump, who promised repeatedly on the campaign trail last year that he would not touch basic safety nets such as Medicaid, Medicare and social security. The president’s loyal supporters in the Maga (“Make America great again”) movement have cautioned against the move.Steve Bannon, who served as chief White House strategist in Trump’s first administration and remains a persuasive voice within the movement, recently told listeners to his War Room podcast: “You got to be careful, because a lot of Maga is on Medicaid.”Josh Hawley, the Republican US senator from Missouri, recently said that “slashing health insurance for the working poor” would be “politically suicidal”. More

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      How the Ravages of Age Are Ravaging the Democratic Party

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      Now is the time for the Democratic Party to get serious about its oldsters problem.The furor over President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues is not going away any time soon. On Tuesday it bubbled up in the California governor’s race, when one candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, accused two other Democrats eyeing the governor’s mansion — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra — of participating in a “cover-up” of Mr. Biden’s fading fitness in office.“Voters deserve to know the truth. What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Mr. Villaraigosa fumed in a statement, spurred by tidbits from the new book “Original Sin,” which chronicles the efforts of Mr. Biden’s inner circle to conceal his mental and physical decline. Mr. Villaraigosa called on Ms. Harris and Mr. Becerra to “apologize to the American people.”Is Mr. Villaraigosa, who is 72 himself, exploiting the orgy of Biden recriminations for political ends? Probably. Does he have a point? Absolutely. Team Biden deserves much abuse for its sins. That said, last week also reminded us that the Democrats’ flirtation with gerontocracy is not confined to a single office or branch of government when, on Wednesday, the House was shaken by the death of Representative Gerry Connolly.Mr. Connolly, a 75-year-old lawmaker from Northern Virginia, had been in poor health. On Nov. 7 last year, two days after his re-election to a ninth term, he announced he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo treatments. Even so, in December he won a high-profile contest against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. The race was seen as a struggle over the future of the seniority system that has long shaped how Democrats pick committee leaders. Despite concerns about his health, seniority carried the day. On April 28, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election next year. Less than a month later, he was gone.Washington being Washington, his death was greeted with sadness but also with chatter about the political repercussions in the narrowly divided House. It was not lost on Beltway pundits that if Democrats had had one more “no” vote in their deliberations over President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Republicans would have had to sway another of their holdouts to ram it through the House last week.Mr. Connolly was the third House Democrat to die in recent months, after the deaths in March of Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner, both septuagenarians. All three seats are vacant for now. Axios pointed out that eight members of Congress have died in office since November 2022. All were Democrats, with an average age of 75.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More