Summer of 2017 Redux

This administration is exhausting.

We're only 139 days into it, and already it feels like years. Each day is a lifetime unto its own. Between Trump's whiny Truth Social posts to his brownshirts hiding behind ICE badges, to the rising cost of items courtesy of his failed tariffs, and now to a second version of a travel ban, we are seeing Trump and his people throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. As I shared two weeks ago, Trump and his goons are losing at a remarkable 96% rate when it comes to recent court decisions, but that hasn't stopped them from continuing to outright ignore the United States Constitution. While last week's 6-3 decision granting DOGE the ability to access social security data is certainly troubling, the fact remains that DOGE has failed in its mission to cut government waste, with one of its former engineers claiming that federal waste and fraud were 'relatively nonexistent' in an NPR interview from last week. And with Marcelo Gomez da Silva being released and Kilmar Garcia returning to the United States, there has at least been some justice for two of the more high-profile immigration cases that Trump and his cronies have used to try to justify their continued use of ICE as an anti-immigrant deportation force.

The thing is that we've seen all this before. While Americans as a whole have short memories, those of us in the political world cannot afford that luxury. And so it's important to remember that what we're seeing here in June of 2025 is eerily reminiscent of what we saw in June of 2017. Similarly, during those first four months of the Trump Administration, we saw a huge wave of testing the legal limits of what they could do. This was during the time of the first travel ban, when we saw immigration attorneys flock to airports to try and assist those caught up in Trump's haphazard executive order. Meanwhile, the Republican-led Congress was working behind the scenes to try and do what Trump and every Republican for the last 8 years had been dreaming of: gutting the Affordable Care Act. Had it not been for John McCain's heroic no vote in the Senate, nearly 20 million Americans would have very likely lost their healthcare. The only thing Trump and his cronies passed the rest of the year was tax cuts, the benefits of which went directly to the richest Americans.

Flash forward 8 years, and we're in a similar situation. Only this time, instead of the ACA, Republicans have their eyes set on cuts to Medicaid, a key part of their Big Beautiful Bill that now lies in Senate hands. Of course, the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, but as we all know, Republicans only care about the deficit when a Democrat is in the White House. While Trump continues to play-fight with Elon Musk online, members of his party are once again debating the same question they did 8 years ago: do they follow Trump and vote to harm millions of their own voters, or do they vote against Trump and actually do the jobs they were elected to do? Are there four decent Republican senators left, or is the party officially pot-committed to the conman from Queens who's never had to work a real day in his life? 

While we can never fully count out the evilness of the modern GOP, what we can count on is their craven ambition. They like being in positions of power, and they don't want to lose those positions anytime soon. That is why several GOP senators have come out against certain provisions of the bill, including those considered to be key swing votes. Issues emerging are the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, spending levels, the trillions added to the deficit (Rand Paul, of course), AI regulation, state and local tax (SALT) deductions, and making the current corporate tax breaks permanent. Like any Trump policy, the initial version of this bill gives in to the GOP's worst instincts to harm the largest number of people to benefit the privileged few. With just under a month to go until the July 4th deadline, the question becomes what compromises will be made, what are absolute non-negotiables, and who do certain GOP senators feel most loyal to: their constituents or their orange overlord? Answering these questions will tell us whether the GOP passes a bad bill or one that will go down in the annals of history as one that fundamentally reshapes the social safety net in this country. 

Not all is lost. Like 2017, we need each and every voter calling their senators, telling them to vote no on the current version of the bill. We need to flood the voicemail boxes of Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jerry Moran, and Josh Hawley, who have all expressed concern about Medicare cuts. We need to contact GOP senators in the swing states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania and tell them to vote no on the bill. We even need to call Rand Paul and tell him to vote against the bill in its current form. Senators don't always listen to their constituents but if they are hearing nonstop from them in the days and weeks leading up to the final vote, they will at the very least think twice about the vote their about to cast and whether or not that vote keeps them easily employed or if that vote makes their life much more difficult the next time they're up for re-election. We shot down the GOP's efforts to kick millions of Americans off their healthcare in 2017, and if we raise our voices loud enough, we can do the same in 2025.

We have no choice but to try.