“These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.”
— Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), quoted by AL.com.
“Democratic groups are launching a major organizing push Monday to attack Republicans’ signature bill this summer and prepare for the coming elections, an effort that will focus on voter registration and volunteer efforts to make their case to community groups not focused on politics,” the Washington Post reports.
“The new initiative is led by the Democratic National Committee, the state party chair association and Democrats’ House, Senate and gubernatorial campaign arms. It will ramp up the party’s activity ahead of this fall’s elections and the 2026 midterms, which will serve as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s second term and test Democrats’ ability to rebound.”
“Senate Republicans said they expected to begin voting on amendments to the domestic policy bill at 9 a.m. Monday, after taking a break likely sometime after midnight, rather than working all night,” the New York Times reports.
“The decision not to move from debate straight into the so-called vote-a-rama, an hours-long series of votes on amendments, could indicate that Republican leaders are still struggling to lock in support.”
Washington Post: “The GOP is racing to push the mammoth budget proposal across Trump’s desk by a self-imposed July 4 deadline, but fissures remain within the party over the cuts to social benefit and anti-poverty programs and the bill’s growing price tag.”
Wall Street Journal: “If the Senate manages to pass the bill, getting the measure to Trump by Republicans’ self-imposed July 4 deadline would require another vote from the House. That might be challenging in that chamber as well, where Republicans have a narrow 220-212 majority and their initial version of the bill passed by just one vote last month.”
For members: A Few Thoughts on the “Big, Beautiful Bill”
“The Trump White House is moving at a far faster clip in 2025 to remake the federal government and American life, in large part because Stephen Miller has put the agenda on steroids,” Bloomberg reports.
“Miller, 39, has amassed power and influence through nearly a decade in President Donald Trump’s orbit. Long seen as the driving force behind the West Wing’s immigration policies, Miller is now also leading the campaign to bend the nation’s top universities to Trump’s will.”
“The Trump administration has built a searchable national citizenship data system,” NPR reports.
“The tool is designed to be used by state and local election officials to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.”
“Membership in China’s ruling Communist Party passed the 100 million mark, but the pace of growth slowed for the third straight year amid Beijing’s long-running push to rein in the party’s expansion,” Bloomberg reports.
New York Times: “Mr. Mamdani changed the electoral map. In the 14 days leading up to the registration deadline for the Democratic primary, about 37,000 people registered to vote, compared with about 3,000 people in the same period in 2021.”
“Mr. Mamdani’s campaign had focused on registering voters, and he also appears to have drawn thousands of voters to the primary who did not vote four years ago.”
ProPublica: “In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.”
“In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.”
“Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public.”
Palm Beach Post: “Is President Donald Trump coming to the so-called ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration detention center Tuesday?”
“The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ‘VIP Movement Notification’ for Tuesday, July 1, for Ochopee, Fla. The alert is for a 30/10 NMR, which stands for a protective inner core radius of 10 nautical miles and an outer ring radius of 30 nautical miles.”
Playbook: “There’s a dawning realization on the Hill that the procedural tricks being deployed by GOP leaders to get this thing done may someday come back to bite them. The Republicans’ use of the so-called current policy baseline — an accounting trick by which temporary tax cuts are made permanent without any apparent cost in the budget — could in theory be used in equally imaginative ways by a future Dem trifecta to enact high-cost policies like Medicare For All via reconciliation.”
Sahil Kapur: “If ‘current policy’ becomes the norm in reconciliation, one (very) hypothetical example of how Democrats could wield it: Pass a $10 trillion Medicare For All bill for 1 yr at a $1T sticker price and extend it permanently the next year at a $0 cost. All without nuking the filibuster.”
“Rep. Elise Stefanik has a massive edge over other Republicans in a hypothetical party primary to take on Gov. Kathy Hochul next year, a new poll found,” the New York Post reports.
“Some 64% of Republicans would support Stefanik — while only 8% would back Hudson Valley Rep. Michael Lawler.”
Playbook: “Tillis’ looming departure has instantly injected some fresh buzz into the political conversation in D.C; not least because we now have a second GOP senator (alongside Mitch McConnell) who clearly now gives — to be crude — no shits at all what Trump thinks.”
“Witness Tillis’ performance on the Senate floor last night, shredding Trump’s flagship legislation before the eyes of the world and even suggesting the president has been duped. The next 18 months in Tillis world may be quite a lot of fun.”
Punchbowl News: “Senate GOP leaders made the unusual — and unpopular among the rank-and-file — decision Sunday night to take a break before starting the high-stakes vote-a-rama that comes at the end of every budget reconciliation push in the Senate.”
“Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s move to bring senators back in at 9 a.m. for the amendment marathon is a departure from the norm. The process, during which senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments, usually occurs in the overnight hours with the goal of exacting as much pain as possible and wearing senators down.”
“A daytime vote-a-rama likely means the process could drag out much longer — possibly until early Tuesday morning, some GOP senators predict.”
“Republicans’ marquee domestic policy bill that is making its way through the Senate would result in deeper cuts and more Americans losing health insurance coverage than the original measure that passed the House last month, according to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office,” the New York Times reports.
“According to a report published late Saturday night, the legislation would mean 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034. Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare would be reduced by more than $1.1 trillion over that period — with more than $1 trillion of those cuts coming from Medicaid alone.”
“The fresh estimates make official what many analysts had already predicted and some Republican lawmakers had feared.”
“Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said late Sunday trade talks with U.S. have resumed after Canada rescinded its plan to tax U.S. technology firms,” the AP reports.
“A ferocious advertising campaign is underway with passage of President Donald Trump’s landmark policy bill hanging in the balance, as political groups and business interests spent at least $35 million just this month to try to sway key members of Congress and their constituents,” CNN reports.
New York Times: “This time around, Senate Republicans are instead invoking an alternative accounting method that wipes away the cost of extending tax cuts already in place. Republicans argue that the tax cuts they originally passed in 2017, which expire at the end of the year, should be baked into the country’s fiscal forecasts even though Congress has not yet actually renewed them. By that logic, the $3.8 trillion cost of extending the 2017 cuts is zero, and those cuts can be extended for decades even though reconciliation’s rules prohibit long-term deficit increases.”
“The entire Senate Republican bill relies on this view of the tax cuts’ costs. Without this accounting assumption, the legislation would run afoul of Senate rules and require Republicans to rework the entire 940-page project, which President Trump has demanded be ready for his signature by July 4.”
Wall Street Journal: GOP declares tax-cut extensions “free” to obscure megabill’s cost.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.