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A president with a track record of legislative failure returns to the White House with his party in control of Congress and pushes his party to combine all of its legislative priorities into one piece of legislation.
What could go wrong?
It turns out a lot could and has gone wrong.
The Big Beautiful Bill is really a big beautiful minefield, and it is looking increasingly likely that the bill is going to sink under its own weight.
One week away from a possible House floor vote, the GOP’s massive tax and spending bill is facing opposition from enough lawmakers to defeat it and criticism from senators eager to rewrite it.
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To avoid an implosion, House Speaker Mike Johnson needs near-unanimous support from his members for legislation touching everything from tax cuts to the debt ceiling to border security to health care. He doesn’t have it yet — and it’s not clear what will happen if he can’t get it.
“I’m hopeful we can get there in the timeframe — but if not, I’d be really seriously concerned on what the actual Plan B is, because I haven’t heard about it,” said Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla.
There is no backup plan for this legislation, but House Democrats are waiting in the wings with a bipartisan version of the bill that takes out the healthcare and food assistance cuts, and kills the tax cuts for the rich after the Republican bill fails.
The problem is that Republicans have shown no sign that they are interested in working with Democrats on a bipartisan tax bill, so what happens if the Big Beautiful Bill fails?
The odds are that this debacle will drag out until the end of the year. The program cuts will be dropped, and the only two pieces that Republicans can pass, the extension of the Trump tax cuts and immigration funding, will be passed as separate, smaller bills.
The rest of this fiasco will be thrown in the trash, because Republicans are not going to do any program cuts in an election year, which means that Republicans have one chance at this bill, and they are failing.
Even if the House passes their bill, the Senate is going rewrite the whole thing, and House Republicans are warning that they won’t pass the Senate bill, so even if Trump gets involved and Speaker Mike Johnson squeaks this bill through, the encouraging news for the American people is that the long-term prospects for this legislation ever becoming law aren’t good.
What do you think about the potential demise of the Big Beautiful Bill? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
