Trump’s Tax-and-Spend Bill Is a Fiasco. Just Ask Republicans Who Voted for It

The Senate passed Donald Trump’s tax bill on Tuesday, sending the latest version of the legislation back to the House for more debate. The so-called “Big Beautiful BIll” slashes taxes for millionaires and billionaires, strips millions of lower-income Americans of health insurance, and adds trillions to the national debt. It also pays for a grab bag of military boondoggles, while allocating additional billions for the administration to further ramp up its horrifying mass-deportation regime, complete with masked officers and gulags for migrants.

Will the House approve the Senate version of the bill? Just three GOP defections will doom Trump’s top legislative priority, and the party’s largest donor, Elon Musk, is railing against it as a “disgusting abomination” and threatening to create a third, competing political party if it passes. There are plenty of Republican lawmakers who take a similarly dim view of the bill — including many who voted for it.

Here’s what they’re saying:

VOTED NO

Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.)

“There will be a day that conservatives will rue the fact that some of them actually voted for this.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)

“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by

pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore? The guys in the White House advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) 

“My vote against this bill stems primarily from the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid, affecting low-income families and rural health care providers like our hospitals and nursing homes.”

“This bill has additional problems. The tax credits that energy entrepreneurs have relied on should have been gradually phased out so as not to waste the work that has already been put into these innovative new projects and prevent them from being completed.” 
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VOTED YES

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

“I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) 

“This has been an unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid. And I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching. If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver for working-class people.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

“Do I like this bill? No.”

“Let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it. My sincere hope is that this is not the final product.”

“My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”

Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.)
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“This is grotesque what we’re doing.”

“Mortgaging our children’s future is wrong and immoral. We need to get off this unsustainable path and the ‘big beautiful bill’ doesn’t even begin to take us off this path.”

HOUSE OPPONENTS OF THE SENATE VERSION

Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)

“The Big Beautiful Bill is a fiscal suicide pact between the White House and Republicans in Congress. The numbers don’t lie…. It will add $4 trillion to the debt… in addition to the  $20 to 30 trillion of debt that was going to be incurred over the next ten years already!”

Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.)

“[D]elete their dud and replace it.”

Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.)

“This is political stupidity; it’s political suicide. There are a lot of working poor, blue-collar people [who are now] part of this new Republican Party…. Why would you hurt these people?”

THE MONEYMAN

Elon Musk (who spent $290 million getting Trump and Republicans elected)

“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.”

“Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

“If this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day.”
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“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!”

“And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”