A description of an autocrat’s offenses against a free people

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported the Big Brutal Bill passed the House. The margin 218-214 isn’t as tight as when it first passed the House a month ago. Two Republicans voted against it. Republicans in swing districts were concerned with the big Medicaid cuts and voted for it anyway. Those who said they could not vote for adding trillions to the deficit voted for it anyway. And Dear Leader got his wish to sign the bill on Independence Day, his declared deadline.

While Republicans celebrate the bill's passage, Democrats warn that it will be only a pyrrhic victory. The Democratic Party plans to hang the overwhelmingly unpopular legislation around the GOP's neck in the 2026 midterm elections. In a record-breaking speech lasting more than 8 hours and 32 minutes, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries lambasted Republicans’ bill, saying it violates the principles they pray to in the Bible. “We’re going to press on until victory is won,” he said. And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the Senate passed the bill, “This vote will haunt Republicans for years to come.” In fact, even House Speaker Mike Johnson warned his members that passing the bill was probably the death knell of his narrow House majority, due to the bill’s deep Medicaid cuts. Yet, rather than amend the bill, he passed the Senate version and possibly sealed the fate of his speakership.

Already, a hospital in rural Nebraska, one that has mostly Medicaid patients, has said the Medicaid cuts make an already tough financial situation worse and they will close. Bill Addis of the Kos community reported that yesterday, while the brutal bill was still being debated, Rep. Jamie Raskin read a “preamble” for the Big Ugly Bill into the Congressional Record:

We the billionaires, and our King, in order to deform and sicken our Union, establish injustice, ensure domestic servility, weaken our peoples defenses, undermine our general welfare, and reserve to ourselves and our posterity staggering debt servitude for eternity, do hereby instruct the Republicans in Congress to strip 17 million people of their healthcare, increase copays, premiums and deductibles for everyone else, cut 42 million people off of nutritional assistance, increase the national debt by 4 trillion dollars, trash renewable energy systems, increase our electric bills for the carbon kings, all to weaken and destroy the Constitution of the people of these United States of America.

The nasty guy objected to Raskin’s words and Addis took some time to dissect them. Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos showing the nasty guy siphoning gasoline out of an ambulance and into a very expensive car. The hose is labeled “Megabill.” Margaret Coker, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, discussed the Medicaid work mandate in Georgia, the only state that has a mandate. As of May this year about 3% of the nearly 250,000 eligible Georgians enrolled in Medicaid, even though 64% of those eligible are working. The reason is bureaucratic hurdles in the work verification system. That system is known as Georgia Pathways to Coverage and Gov. Brian Kemp admitted it was never designed for maximum enrollment. He’s in favor of moving from government-run health care. The system was glitchy and those who worked in the informal economy, such as house cleaners, didn’t have the required documentation. The national bill just signed, based on Georgia’s experience, will cost hundreds of millions in administrative costs and threaten coverage for nearly 16 million people. At least the federal system requires verifying employment only twice a year instead of monthly. Arkansas did have work requirements, but Republican state lawmakers changed their minds when the verification process threw 18,000 people off in just a few months. A federal judge helped that along by ruling the uninsured rate went up without increased employment. The federal bill gives $100 million to be divided among the states, but Georgia spent $55 million to get their system set up. And Kentucky expects administrative costs to top $200 million. The federal math isn’t mathin’. The federal bill says nothing about staffing or who pays for them. Georgia Pathways is understaffed and in March had a 5,000 application backlog. Verifying employment means more caseworkers, which means more expense for states. Or maybe the cost gets passed to counties.

“There are provisions in there that are very, very, very challenging, if not impossible, for us to implement,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told reporters in June of the costs facing her state to meet the House bill requirements.

She said that before Alaska got an exemption on Medicaid changes. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev started with a quote from Jennifer Rubin of the Contrarian on a topic appropriate for Independence Day.

Desperate for some inspiration, I decided to reread the entire Declaration of Independence. We know it as an aspirational document (“We hold these truths…”). We understand it as a repudiation of tyranny (“Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”). It is both those things, but it is also a compendium of complaints, a description of an autocrat’s offenses against a free people. And that was the part I found strangely relevant to our times. The signers railed about exclusionary immigration policies that hurt the colonies (“He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither”). They inveighed against barriers to trade (“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”). And they condemned imposing “Taxes on us without our Consent,” which, if we remember that unilaterally imposed tariffs are a consumer tax, also sounds familiar. Tyrants, then and now, seek to dominate and micromanage commerce to the detriment of ordinary people seeking a better life. And notice the common problem, then and now, when a tyrant attempts to corrupt the rule of law by seeking to intimidate and threaten members of the judiciary (“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices”); seeks to impair due process (“depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”); and even ships people out of the country for punishment (“Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”). The tyrant playbook has not changed much in nearly 250 years.

In the comments are several good cartoons and memes. A cartoon posted by paulpro and created by Branch shows a man of color doing yard work while inside the house a man holds a “Mass Deportation Now!” sign and the woman says, “Let’s wait for him to finish cleaning up the yard before putting the sign back.” Underneath the cartoon is a tweet from Human, “How did the poor guy mowing your lawn every two weeks become the biggest national security threat, rather than a Defense Secretary posting war plans on Signal?” Another cartoon posted by paulpro shows Lady Liberty blowing out candles in a birthday cake. Uncle Sam asks, “A 249th birthday! What do we wish for?” Lady Liberty replies, “A 250th.” The Political Cartoon Gallery posted one from Morten Morland showing the nasty guy talking to the founding fathers, “Let’s declare a big, beautiful independence from the tyranny of checks and balances!” A third cartoon posted by paulrpo is by Clay Bennett. Half of it shows a classroom and has the words, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who prevent history from being taught fully intend to repeat it.” The other half shows a library in which the only book is Project 2025. A meme posted by Angie is Pissed has a creator I can’t make out. It says:

Unfriendly Reminder: If you only support abortion in instance of rape or incest, you’re reinforcing the idea that in order for a woman to have a right to her body, someone else has to violate it first.

I like this one: Exsyntrix posted a cartoon by Garth German showing people reacting to a woman wearing a shirt with the words, “Freedom includes me making choices that conflict with your faith.” A week ago Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy might have his very own housing crash.

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte just ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to treat cryptocurrency—a volatile and largely unregulated mess—as an asset when evaluating whether to purchase mortgages from banks. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae support about 70% of the mortgages in the country. They don’t issue loans but instead buy up home loans and package them into mortgage-backed securities, which are then sold to private investors. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae then guarantee payments to those investors if the mortgage holder defaults. You can see where this is going. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are likely going to have to issue loans to people partly based on their cryptocurrency holdings. So when the cryptocurrency market collapses and homebuyers default on loans, Freddie and Fannie will have to cover the resulting losses.

Ten days ago Needham reported on the state of abortion to mark the third anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. At the time Justice Alito promised the Dobbs decision would return abortion to the states. A lot of people knew that promise was a lie. Yeah, there is an effort to ban abortion nationwide. It is shown in trying to apply the 1873 Comstock Act that criminalizes mailing “obscene materials” to shipping abortion drugs across state lines. A problem for anti-abortion crusaders is even in red states people want abortion to be legal, as shown by approving ballot measures to do that. There are efforts to ban travel for abortion and efforts by red state officials to try to reach into blue states to prosecute doctors and clinics. And the nasty guy is trying to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds. In Texas a man was arrested for slipping abortion pills into his girlfriend’s coffee. Yeah, that is a crime. But the man is being charged with murder under the claim that harming an embryo is the same as killing a human. The case is really about making life hell for anyone seeking an abortion out of state. As part of that there are efforts to allow one state to demand health records for suspected abortions in other states. States are criminalizing pregnancy, as in banning taking certain drugs while pregnant. Or having to prove a miscarriage wasn’t an abortion. Even in states where abortion is legal and protected clinics are running low on money and having to close. Planned Parenthood had to close four in each of Michigan, New York, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. People are dying from not being able to get an abortion. But many states have stopped tracking that data. The public won’t be able to tell. In contrast, abortion, especially medicated abortion, is significantly less dangerous than pregnancy. Needham also reported that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case based on a boring technical question. But it can have profound implications because the plaintiff is a chain of crisis pregnancy centers. Those are the places that advertise pregnancy care. Once a patient shows up they use a variety of tactics, based on lies, to keep that woman from having an abortion. So the case is really about protecting the ability for these clinics to lie. Since the high court is done for the summer I guess this case will have oral arguments in the fall. Needham reported that Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem went to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador to have photos of her posing in front of an overcrowded prison cell. Yet, she said they were receiving terrific care – mattresses, full meals, exercise, and medical checkups. The nasty guy and Noem knew that if Klmar Abrego Garcia was ever let out of CECOT he could prove Noem was lying. That was a big reason why they refused to bring him back, though being sent there was a mistake they admitted to. Abrego Garcia is back and is talking about his experiences. Remember the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison scandal from 20 years ago? Yeah, that’s how Abrego Garcia was treated. He’s amending his legal complaint (not well described) to tell about his treatment. Through that court document he’s also telling the world. Abrego Garcia is incarcerated right now facing bogus charges. He asked the judge to keep him there. He knows the moment he is released ICE would immediately deport him again. My city has given up on fireworks for Independence Day. Detroit had a big display on the river last week, but from newspaper reports it would have been hard to get to. Other cities around me have already done their fireworks display or won’t do one at all. So the residents around me have bought fireworks at the various stores and since 9:30 this evening the noise has been constant. I think the city ordinance says they have to stop at 11:30, which is bedtime for me.