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A Big, Beautiful Test of GOP Principles and Discipline
The “Big, Beautiful Bill”—a massive package of tax relief, more funding for immigration enforcement, and savings from entitlement reforms—is now law, and it’s a triumph not only for President Donald Trump but for the whole Republican Party.
The GOP passed two make-or-break tests here: one of party discipline, the other of political principles.
And the party saved its life by getting this bill enacted.
The stakes were so high because most of the BBB’s tax cuts only continued the lower rates Trump shepherded through in his first term.
But that relief was temporary, and if the Congress hadn’t made it permanent by passing the BBB, Americans would have seen their taxes go up.
This wasn’t just a vote about tax cuts—it was a vote against a tax hike.
Democrats wanted Republicans to commit suicide by letting taxes go up on their watch.
What would happen to a tax-hiking Republican Congress in next year’s midterms?
What would happen to a Republican Congress that humiliated Trump by failing to deliver the legislation he promised?
The answers are obvious: This was an existential trial for the party.
Liberals played three cards to try to get Republicans to torpedo their own majority and president.
First, they used their media leverage to make the bill as unpopular as possible, though most people polled had no idea what the bill’s details were or that their taxes were guaranteed to go up if it didn’t pass.
As always, Democrats tried to demonize spending reductions as attacks on the poor, though any voter who looks at what the bill actually says will find commonsense reforms, such as requiring that able-bodied recipients of Medicaid support work at least 80 hours a month to qualify for benefits.
Is working 10 days a month too much to ask of able-bodied beneficiaries between the ages of 18-64?
And the law exempts parents who are raising children.
Democrats will scour the country for woeful anecdotes to promote ahead of next year’s midterms, but if Republicans campaign on the clear merits of the law they’ve passed, voters will reward them.
The other cards the bill’s opponents played came from dissident factions on the right and put Republican principles to the test.
Ironically, the two arguments against the BBB on the right came from utterly opposed rival camps: the libertarians and the New New Dealers.
The libertarians had a champion in Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, one of only two House Republicans to vote against the bill in the end.
“I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term,” he wrote on X.
But why would higher deficits be worse than higher taxes?
The more libertarian policy is actually to let Americans keep more of their own money, no matter what.
Even if someone like Massie disputes that, the practical upshot of defeating the BBB wouldn’t be to keep deficits down anyway, since the bill’s failure would hasten the return of Democrats to power.
The result would be higher taxes and more spending, the dead opposite of what libertarians want.
Antithetical to Massie, yet also opposed to the BBB, are those conservatives with high-profile media perches who want to conserve the New Deal.
These New New Dealers consider the welfare state as sacred as Democrats do—they prefer bigger government and imagine it can be used for socially conservative ends.
They don’t want tax cuts for all Americans, only families, in the form of more expansive child tax credits.
Yet the BBB helps families tremendously, not only by lowering their taxes along with everyone else’s but also by creating “Trump accounts,” which allow parents and their employers to make tax-advantaged contributions for a newborn’s future needs, such as college or buying a home.
The Trump accounts even start every American baby off with a $1,000 contribution from the federal government.
Yet Trump accounts aren’t the specific policy the New New Dealers want, and they find the BBB’s spending cuts and taxpayers-first philosophy abhorrent.
They looked to Vice President JD Vance as their champion, but he strongly supported the bill, which was in keeping with the ethic of self-responsibility (not welfarism) laid out in his memoir-manifesto “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Democrats have spent a decade praying Trump would shatter the Republican coalition, but instead he’s strengthened it, clarifying the party’s aims and defying the fringes.
He listens to libertarians and family-policy engineers, but he wouldn’t allow narrow concerns to veto a bill that protects the border and lowers taxes for essentially everyone.
With a single-digit majority in the House, if Republicans had any serious divisions, they would have lost this fight.
Instead, they’re as unified behind low taxes as they were in Ronald Reagan’s day, even as they’ve added new priorities as well.
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