Coming home after a dinner with friends last night I saw a young man on the side of the interstate trying, hard, to get into a small white car.
That sucks, I thought, the guy got himself locked out of his car late on an extremely muggy night.
A few seconds later I asked myself the obvious question: is it his car? Bad luck or crime in progress? What I saw driving by could have been either.
Now let’s look at Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. After passing the U. S. House of Representatives by half a whisker it sits in the U. S. Senate.
Alas, the more legislators learn about the bill the less they like it. For example, that denizen of the shadows Marjorie Taylor Greene now says she won’t vote for the bill again because it prevents states from regulating artificial intelligence, and, well, she never really read the bill before she voted for it the first time. And, Missouri’s senior senator Josh Hawley has said he won’t vote for a bill that cuts Medicaid so many times that some folks are actually starting to believe him. Yet the Washington betting establishment still thinks Trump has at least a 60% chance of getting the BBB passed – with no opposition from any of Missouri’s Republicans in Congress.
So, the question becomes who sees what in the bill that they can use to justify supporting it. Trump and his ilk, like Senator Mitch McConnell, claim to see the rocket fuel which will supercharge the economy for decades to come. Meanwhile those of us unfortunate enough to remember the holes Ronald Reagan cut in the social safety net see hungry kids and closed hospitals. Both interpretations can seem correct, especially to Missouri’s GOP representatives and senators in Congress. Still, that group wants to keep Trump and his myriad of followers happy. Yet, they know that their votes can inflict terrible pain on hundreds of thousands (perhaps even a million and a half) of their Missouri neighbors.
Not at issue is how the bill will save the ultra rich billions in taxes and add trillions of dollars to the national debt while cutting Medicaid, food stamps, national parks, work place safety and a host of other pretty good things.
McConnell’s response? ‘They’ll get over it,’ McConnell reportedly assures GOP colleagues about Medicaid cuts. In other words, Republican voters are too short sighted to remember in 2026 bad things done to them in 2025.
He’s probably right. Notice that the average Missourian hasn’t rebelled against our legislature taking away sick leave enacted by voters, nor has the general population objected to being forced to vote yet again on allowing legal abortions. Our state supports social progress and elected officials dedicated to stomping out that progress.
Again, I don’t know if it was that young man’s car he was trying to enter. I do know I saw something and an answer would be helpful. Republicans must try to not remember what they see.
Glenn Koenen