Your elected representatives aren't paying attention to what they're passing: "Last week, Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska admitted during a town hall meeting in his district that he did not know that the ["big beautiful"] bill would limit judges' power to hold people in contempt for violating court orders," reports The New York Times. (This provision seems to be a direct MAGA response to the judges who have issued injunctions that block the president's ability to rule by executive order.) "Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said that she had been unaware that the mega-bill she voted for would block states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade." Of course, it's a 1,037-page bill; most lawmakers voting on it will not read it in full. Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), for his part, called on his colleagues to "take more than a few hours to read a bill this big and this consequential." Maybe he was right.
Republicans almost universally voted with their party on this bill, rushing to meet the House speaker's Memorial Day deadline to get it through the finish line. "It's hard to read over 1,000 pages when things keep changing up to the last minute before we voted on it," complained Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), as if she doesn't have the power to, like Massie, advocate for more time and thoughtfulness.
The bill extends tax cuts passed by Republicans back in 2017 and makes certain tax code changes, "including lower marginal income rates, a larger standard deduction and a higher threshold for the estate tax," per the Times. Americans will soon be able to deduct car loan interest from their taxable income, as long as the cars are manufactured domestically. The child tax credit (with tightened standards) will be enlarged, and newborns born between January 1, 2025, and January 1, 2029, will now receive "Trump accounts" with $1,000 deposited in them. University endowment taxes would rise, drastically. SALT deduction caps will be massively raised. Medicaid will have very strict work requirements attached to it.
