The Sour Spot

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Obamacare had a theory. Through a blend of mandates and subsidies, the federal government would turn the private insurance market into a sort of welfare program. People with preexisting health conditions would be covered; people without coverage through work would buy insurance on new exchanges. All adults would be required to purchase a plan, supplying insurers with the new revenue needed to pay for everything.

Americans would be better off on balance than before—in theory. Democrats believed in that theory so strongly that they ignored how terribly Obamacare polled in 2010 and passed the bill anyway. Doing so cost them their House majority.

Republicans now face the same conundrum, as poll after poll confirms that Americans hate the One Big Beautiful Bill. Midterms are rough for the governing party in the best of circumstances, but tossing this stinkbomb at the public could seal the GOP’s fate in the House. That sacrifice might be worth making to pass legislation if that legislation does the country meaningful good.

What is that good?

The bill extends the Trump tax cuts of 2017, sure. But it does so at the cost of another $3.3 trillion in debt over the next 10 years, a burden that’s heavier than it used to be in an era of higher interest rates.

It cuts spending by taking a chunk out of Medicaid, which will leave nearly 12 million people without health coverage by 2034. That’s a weird move for what’s supposed to be a working-class party, enough so to leave populists in Congress smiling through tears.

It not only slashes billions of dollars in incentives for “green energy” projects, it slaps a new tax on wind and solar farms whose supply chains include components from China. Wind and solar will account for almost two-thirds of new electric capacity expected to come online this year and are already helping to keep the lights on in states like Texas. Some green projects that were in the works have been paralyzed by the legislation; without the subsidies, new solar installations could drop by 72 percent over the next decade, putting the U.S. further behind China. Energy costs will rise.

Elon Musk, the president’s frenemy, is beside himself about it. Between this, the global thermonuclear trade war the White House started, and MAGA’s antipathy to immigration in all forms, Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump now looks foolish even by the standards of Faustian bargains.

The best I can do to offer a theory of how the One Big Beautiful Bill will make Americans’ lives better on balance is to mumble “Laffer curve.” But after 40 years of Republicans citing it to justify all manner of fiscal irresponsibility, the Laffer curve is less an economic argument than a magical incantation. If tax cuts paid for themselves by goosing economic growth, our national debt wouldn’t look like this.

This may be the first major legislation in my lifetime that makes no serious pretense of improving Americans’ lives. It’s landed in a bizarre “sour spot” that shouldn’t be possible in a democracy—terrible as policy, more terrible as politics, yet somehow inevitable.

It’s so bad that it’s caused a centrist Republican to suffer a crisis of conscience, another thing that didn’t seem possible in America 2025.

Irrationality.

A governing party that finds itself in the sour spot has two paths it could rationally take. It could go all-in on policy or it could go all-in on politics.

If the GOP wanted to do right by the country, it would hatch a thoughtful plan to reform entitlements, pass it, then take the electoral consequences. Republicans would get annihilated in the midterms, but sometimes that’s the price of doing the right thing, as true-believing Obamacare-era Democrats would tell us.

If instead the GOP wanted to maximize its popularity, it would extend the Trump tax cuts and cancel all of the spending cuts in the bill, beginning with Medicaid. That would be fiscally reckless, but so what? The current legislation is also reckless. It’s purely a matter of degree. Republicans who are willing to pass unpopular garbage should logically be willing to pass popular, albeit marginally smellier, garbage.

Instead of taking either path, the Senate GOP is bent on making the bill just austere enough to make Americans hate it without making it so austere as to achieve something productive. I can’t understand it except as an atavistic reversion to instinct by a dying conservative movement. Having been repeatedly sidelined and humiliated by the president, Reaganites have given up on trying to govern and are resorting to what they know—tax cuts uber alles, sledgehammering Medicaid, etc. There’s no “theory” behind what they’re trying to accomplish. They’re twitching, as people in their death throes often do.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis has also given up on trying to govern, but in a different way.

Tillis announced on Saturday evening that he opposed proceeding with the bill. That triggered a presidential tantrum on Truth Social, replete with predictable threats to primary the senator ahead of his reelection bid next year. Then something unusual happened: Tillis refused to let Trump have leverage over him. On Sunday he announced that he won’t run for reelection and warned that now he’ll have “the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit.” To prove the point, he went to the Senate floor a few hours later and laid into the Big Beautiful Bill for laying waste to Medicaid.

The Trump-Tillis saga was as irrational as the bill itself.

No surprise there on the president’s end, of course. Trump bullying a senator whose vote he’ll need for the next 18 months into retirement is all kinds of stupid, effectively turning Tillis into an independent. And North Carolina is a swing state where the GOP nominee in next year’s Senate race will now lack the advantage of incumbency. The best-case scenario for the party in 2026 is that it holds the seat but has to spend more money there than budgeted. The worst-case scenario is that it flips, the odds of which will grow if Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper gets in.

“Don’t cross Trump,” presidential toady Jason Miller crowed after news of Tillis’ retirement broke, as if the White House had accomplished something boastworthy by chasing one of its majority-makers out of office.

But Tillis’ behavior was also hard to fathom. Not until Sunday, more than 10 years after joining the Senate, did he seem to fully appreciate the political sour spot that moderate Republicans like him now occupy.

Powerless and despised.

I began this piece with a hard question. Here’s another: Why is Sen. John Cornyn voting for the One Big Beautiful Bill?

“He has a primary coming up next year in Texas,” you say. Right—but he’s going to lose that primary badly. His only hope is to convince Trump to endorse him over state attorney general Ken Paxton and that almost certainly won’t happen, as Paxton is a Trump toady of long standing. The writing is on the wall.

I would bet every dollar I have that an old-school conservative like Cornyn privately believes the Senate bill is crap, particularly in how it drives up annual deficits. If he votes against it on those grounds, he’ll lose his primary to Paxton by 25 points. But if he plays ball and stays on the president’s good side, he’ll … lose by only 15 points instead. Why bother?

That’s the recurring story of traditional Republicans in the age of Trump. They’re forever pandering to the president’s fans by deferring to him instead of infuriating them by standing up to him—yet they infuriate them anyway. Somehow they end up both powerless and despised. That’s the sour spot. That’s where Thom Tillis had spent most of the past 10 years until Saturday evening.

Today at The Bulwark, Andrew Egger remembered the many times Tillis showed a little spine in the past at Trump’s expense only, to scramble back onside once the political heat began to rise. He voted to acquit the president at both of his impeachment trials and confirmed unqualified embarrassments like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel for Cabinet positions. A few weeks ago he hired a bunch of former Trump campaign staffers for his (now defunct) Senate reelection bid, presumably in hopes that that would cinch the president’s endorsement.

Then something changed. Either Tillis found the One Big Beautiful Bill so singularly obnoxious that he was willing to blow up his career to kill it or he never understood how MAGA politics works. For a traditional Republican like him who obviously isn’t Trumpy in spirit or on policy, every vote is a litmus test. He can never accumulate enough political capital with the Republican base to be forgiven for eventually failing one. Unlike the true-blue Trumpists in Congress who can say and do wretched things with impunity, the establishment pretenders are forever one betrayal away from excommunication.

If you’re one of those pretenders, the sensible move is to either resolve to pass every litmus test the base offers you and grudgingly be permitted to keep your seat or resolve to “call balls and strikes” from day one of your term in the understanding that you won’t be reelected. Mitt Romney was clear-eyed about that, chose one of those paths, and served honorably. Tillis and John Cornyn chose another, believing that passing most MAGA litmus tests would suffice. It doesn’t. The moment you decide you’re your own man, not Trump’s boy, you’re in dire trouble. It’s one or the other.

You would think moderate Republicans would have figured that out by now, but they continue to resist it, keeping themselves in the sour spot by holding Trump at arm’s length yet never doing much to actually restrain him. “The moderate GOP members just suiciding their careers without a fight is a big story of our time,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller wrote last week of news that Rep. Don Bacon, another centrist Republican, was retiring. “They could’ve fought MAGA, worked with Dems, created a splinter caucus. But instead 1×1 they all mostly went along with Trump then quit. And they are now on [the] precipice of extinction.”

Even Tillis’ rebellion this weekend ended up being for naught. The One Big Beautiful Bill advanced in the Senate because Susan Collins voted in favor. Moderate Republicans are eternally uncomfortable with the state of the party, yet also eternally resigned to never doing much of anything to get in the way. They play ball with the president reluctantly, ensuring that their reluctance earns them the contempt of populists while their willingness to play ball earns them the contempt of everyone else.

It’s about time to be done with them, no?

Death throes.

The Never Trump case for having Thom Tillis or John Cornyn in the Senate was easy in 2017. If they retired, they’d be replaced by a populist nut or an empty suit pretending to be a populist nut. Either type of replacement would do Trump’s bidding. We needed grown-ups in Congress to check the president.

There’s nothing left of that argument in 2025. Cornyn and (until 48 hours ago) Tillis are those empty suits. They’re not going to check the president. The One Big Beautiful Bill proves that more emphatically than their votes on impeachment or Trump’s Cabinet nominees did, in fact. You can imagine a world where traditional Republicans gave the president a wide berth on executive business in exchange for him giving them a wide berth to craft responsible policy. That’s not the world we’re in. The empty suits are prepared to pass legislative slop for no better reason than that the president wants a “win” and cares not a bit how that slop will affect the country.

Moderate Republicans have, in short, become the “respectable” face of conservatives’ contemptible capitulation to Trump. Their purpose in the GOP is to reassure the type of right-wing voter who prefers to be governed by John Cornyn rather than Marjorie Taylor Greene that there’s still room for them in the party. That’s why Tillis’ opposition this weekend enraged the president and his base despite the fact that it didn’t stop the bill. It amounted to him quitting his job as a salesman to swing voters for a stupid, destructive, disreputable postliberal movement.

At this point I’d prefer to see the moderates in Congress replaced with true populists. They’re almost always going to vote the same way anyway, in which case it’d be better to have Trumpists take exclusive ownership of trash like the One Big Beautiful Bill. “Republican leaders have decided that America is a corpse, and that the only thing left to do is to scavenge that corpse,” economist Noah Smith said of the legislation. (I’ve used a similar analogy.) The Cornyn wing of the right can keep voting for scavengers if it likes but, with moderates out of office, at least they’ll no longer have a fig leaf of conservatism to hide behind.

As it is, the fact that this legislation (or something substantially similar) is almost certainly going to become law demonstrates how dysfunctional American democracy has become. A bill as unpopular as this one, that’s plainly poised to do more harm to the country than good, should be unpassable for the simple reason that the people’s representatives have no incentive to pass it. All the more so when the ruling party’s majorities in the House and Senate are narrow, as they are now: Republicans are walking a tightrope and the backlash is creating wild gusts of political wind.

They’re going to pass it anyway because their voters have transferred their political allegiances from ideological principles and beliefs about policy to blind faith that Trump is a national savior whose will is unerring. “The Republican Party today is a cult. Either you do as Trump wants, or you’re out,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said yesterday about Tillis’ retirement. That’s really all there is to it: A congressional Republican is better off electorally by actively harming America if the president favors doing so than making trouble for him by earnestly advancing some rival notion of the public good.

That’s not the way a healthy democracy works. When Democrats committed seppuku in 2010 to pass Obamacare, they told themselves a story about how their new law was good and would grow popular in time. No one’s telling a story like that about the One Big Beautiful Bill. Republicans are passing it solely because their voters have assigned their independent political judgment to the president, and the president wants something big and beautiful to boast about.

Which would be semi-tolerable if Trump himself were a wonk who was serious about policy. He, er, is not. In fact, his priorities in the bill are probably best understood as an expression of culture war as fiscal policy in which the goal is to “own the libs.” The libs hate low tax rates, love welfare programs like Medicaid, and can’t get enough of green energy in the name of slowing the pace of climate change. Naturally, then, Trump’s preferences on all three issues are the opposite—never mind that Republicans are supposed to hate debt, love the impoverished “forgotten man,” and embrace energy abundance in contrast to the fossil-fuel-hating left.

So maybe I was wrong when I said at the start that there’s no theory behind the One Big Beautiful Bill. The theory is that any legislation that does the opposite of what Democrats want must per se be virtuous and productive, irrespective of its particulars. GOP voters are so checked out on policy that, to them, “liberal tears!” really might be the great policy achievement of the time.