The megabill President Donald Trump just signed is remarkably unpopular. Even Fox News admits that according to polls, “Americans are far from thrilled with the measure.” On Monday, Vice President JD Vance took to social media to put some steel in GOP spines. “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” he wrote. The bill “fixes this problem....Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Vance has a point, sort of: The legislation will enormously increase the resources the government will devote to rounding up and incarcerating immigrants, providing tens of billions of dollars for nothing less than a redefinition of American identity. Those provisions are at least as important as the tax giveaways to the wealthy or the brutal cuts to Medicaid, which will take health insurance from as many as 16 million people. Vance has done as much as anyone in the administration to create the philosophical justification for this rejection of not just centuries of history, but America’s very ideals.
This is a preview of Paul Waldman's latest column. Read the full column here. |
