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No President Has Had Something Like Trump’s Megabill

July 3, 2025 at 6:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Ed Kilgore: “Thanks to this bill, Trump could resign tomorrow and still point to an enduring legacy. Quite a few of his executive orders may ultimately be reversed or curtailed by the courts; his key appointees may fall by the wayside out of incompetence and corruption; and some of his policies, like his protectionist tariff regime, may collapse from sheer incoherence. But the 940-page bill he will sign on July 4th will change the country in ways that will be difficult to reverse, even if his party loses Congress and the White House.”

“It is, in fact, the single most sweeping piece of legislation in American history. Other presidents have used the mega-packaging device, known as budget reconciliation, to get around Senate filibusters obstructing their initiatives. But none before Trump have packed a year’s worth of legislation, much of it designed to make major changes in federal policies and personnel, into a single bill, a One-and-Done agenda with no Plan B if it failed.”

Politico: The megabill will soon be megalaw.

A Few Thoughts on the Republican Budget Bill

July 3, 2025 at 5:25 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Despite abysmal public polling and private doubts from within their own ranks, Republicans pushed through a sweeping budget reconciliation package that cements their policy vision for the country.

The vote leaves little doubt: this is the Republican agenda and they were ready to pass it under virtually any circumstances.

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Google Might Be Next to Settle With Trump

July 3, 2025 at 5:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Atlantic: “Trump sued Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the former CEO of Twitter (which Musk later purchased and renamed X) in 2021 for restricting his accounts after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The president alleged that the companies and executives had illegally censored him at the urging of U.S. political leaders, violating his First Amendment rights. It was an ironic argument from a politician who likes to settle political grudges with governmental threats. But it was an effective one: During their postelection courtships of Trump, Zuckerberg settled his case with a payment of $25 million, mostly to Trump’s presidential-library fund, and Musk followed with $10 million more.”

“Now it may be Pichai’s turn. Lawyers for President Trump and Pichai have begun “productive discussions” about the next steps of the case against YouTube, ‘with additional discussions anticipated in the near future,’ according to briefs filed in a San Francisco federal court shortly after Memorial Day that appear to have escaped public notice. The parties have asked the judge to give them until September 2 to come to an agreement on a path forward.”


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Did the Republicans Just Blow Up the Trump Coalition?

July 3, 2025 at 3:44 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Dan Pfeiffer: “This is the least popular piece of major legislation passed since the advent of polling nearly a century ago. But how does this vote impact Republican chances in the midterms? It certainly doesn’t help! It’s impossible to imagine that passing a total piece of shit bill that no one wants (and even most Republicans are ambivalent about) won’t hurt them. Earlier this week, I speculated that it could cost them the Senate despite a very pro-Republican map.”

“However, this bill could be a much bigger deal than just one election. It has the potential to break Trump’s coalition and reshape the electorate to benefit Democrats for several elections to come.”

“The Big Ugly Bill could be a vote that Republicans come to regret for a generation.”

House Passes Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’

July 3, 2025 at 2:35 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Republicans on Thursday notched the first major legislative victory of President Donald Trump’s second term, a mammoth tax and immigration agenda the GOP hopes will reshape the U.S. economy and unwind many of the Biden administration’s accomplishments,” the Washington Post reports.

“The House, in a 218 to 214 vote, passed Trump’s so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ a $3.4 trillion measure to extend tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implement new campaign promises — such as eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime wages — while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and defense.”

“It raises the country’s borrowing cap by $5 trillion, staving off a debt default that the Treasury was weeks away from breaching.”

Inside Hakeem Jeffries’ Decision to Stall Trump’s Bill

July 3, 2025 at 1:30 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The overwhelming consensus on Capitol Hill was that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) would only delay President Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ by about an hour. As noon approached on Thursday, that expectation was shattered,” Axios reports.

“For months, the Democratic base has been demanding their party’s leaders ‘fight harder’ and use every tool at their disposal to stymie the GOP agenda. In the eyes of many lawmakers, this is Jeffries delivering.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the DC Examiner that Jeffries “looks like a bumbling fool.”

Jeffries broke the record for the longest floor speech in the chamber’s history. He spoke for 8 hours and 44 minutes.

One More Bonus Quote of the Day

July 3, 2025 at 12:57 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Tax breaks for billionaires — permanent. Tax breaks for everybody else expire.”

— Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), quoted by Punchbowl News, on the Republican budget reconciliation bill.

Let’s Get Specific

July 3, 2025 at 12:55 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Derek Thompson: “Zohran Mamdani isn’t just charismatic; he’s charismatically specific. In his campaign videos, he’ll walk through city bodegas to tell voters how he might tweak the details of urban retail policy. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a rising star in the Democratic Party, went viral after the election with a straight-to-camera campaign to fix an esoteric regulation that barred daycare workers from peeling bananas to feed infants. She painstakingly explained that peeling fruit technically violated food-processing standards, and so young kids risked going hungry because their teachers were afraid of anti-peeling lawsuits. On the right-of-center podcast Flagrant, Pete Buttigieg also went viral, not by offering a familiar criticism of Donald Trump, but rather by giving a detailed day-in-the-life description of what America would look like if sensible liberal ideas won out.”

“Mamdani, MGP, and Buttigieg represent distinct corners of the Democratic tent. But their communicative successes all borrow from the same lesson. In politics today, specificity is a superpower. Specificity tells voters: I care so much about your frustration that I’ve sought to deeply understand the details of what’s behind it. Specificity doesn’t just offer a story to grab people’s momentary attention. It promises agency. If we can name our problems, we can fix them.”

This Is Who Trump Wants to Protect Whistleblowers

July 3, 2025 at 12:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The man President Donald Trump wants to put in charge of protecting whistleblowers – and rooting out government corruption – is a 30-year-old lawyer with barely a year of government experience and a history of racist invective, conspiratorial rants, and affinity for a well-known White nationalist and Holocaust denier,” CNN reports.

“Paul Ingrassia, whom Trump nominated in late May to lead the Office of Special Counsel, brands himself as ‘President Trump’s favorite writer’ after Trump shared his comments close to 100 times last year on social media.”

And then there’s this: “Last year, on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Ingrassia shared a video of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claiming the US government planned the attacks or let them happen.”

A New Front in Trump’s War on Democracy

July 3, 2025 at 11:15 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Here’s a story that shouldn’t be buried in a pre-holiday news dump…

The New York Times reports the Justice Department is weighing whether to bring criminal charges against state and local election officials it believes failed to adequately secure their voting systems.

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Another Bonus Quote of the Day

July 3, 2025 at 10:48 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better. We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

— Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), in an interview with CNBC, on why he now supports President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Supreme Court to Take Up Case on Transgender Athletes

July 3, 2025 at 10:09 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“The Supreme Court is diving back into the culture war issue of transgender rights, adding a potentially blockbuster case on transgender athletes to its next term,” USA Today reports.

“The court’s July 3 announcement that it will review Idaho’s and West Virginia’s bans on transgender athletes joining female sports teams came just weeks after the court’s conservative majority upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors.”

New York Times: “The justices agreed to hear the cases during the court’s next term, which begins in early October. They have not yet set a date for oral argument.”

Jeffries Has His Moment in Hourslong Speech

July 3, 2025 at 10:07 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, passed the four-hour mark on Thursday morning in a marathon speech in the House opposing Republicans’ signature legislation carrying out President Trump’s domestic agenda,” the New York Times reports.

“Beginning his remarks before dawn, Mr. Jeffries said that he was ‘planning to take my sweet time’ with his speech.”

“It was not a filibuster, the Senate tactic that allows a member to speechify for unlimited time, delaying action indefinitely. But Mr. Jeffries was making use of his prerogative as a leader to stretch his allotted 60 seconds of speaking time for far longer, in a House tradition known as a ‘magic minute.’ In doing so, he was attempting to seize a pivotal moment for Democrats — who have toiled to find a cohesive strategy, message and messenger for countering Mr. Trump — to make a forceful case against the president and his agenda.”

Punchbowl News: “If Hakeem Jeffries speaks until 1:26 p.m., he will break the record for the longest floor speech. That record is held by Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy spoke for eight hours and 32 minutes.”

Droughts Worldwide Push Millions Towards Starvation

July 3, 2025 at 10:03 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Drought is pushing tens of millions of people to the edge of starvation around the world, in a foretaste of a global crisis that is rapidly deepening with climate breakdown,” The Guardian reports.

“More than 90 million people in eastern and southern Africa are facing extreme hunger after record-breaking drought across many areas, ensuing widespread crop failures and the death of livestock. In Somalia, a quarter of the population is now edging towards starvation, and at least a million people have been displaced.”

How Hunter Biden Helped Derail His Father’s Re-Election

July 3, 2025 at 10:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Wall Street Journal: “On June 3, Hunter Biden reported to a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Del., to face three felony charges for lying on a federal firearms application and possessing a gun while abusing drugs. Beyond the danger to Hunter’s liberty, the trial was sure to embarrass the Biden family, airing sordid secrets from the painful years after Hunter’s brother Beau Biden died of cancer.”

“Much of the public was unaware of the depths of turmoil within the Biden family—affairs, addiction, alcoholism—and now it would all spill out, five months before the election. To prove Hunter Biden was abusing drugs when he purchased the gun, prosecutors planned to call three star witnesses: his ex-girlfriend, whom he met when she was a stripper; his ex-wife, the mother of three of his daughters; and Beau’s widow, with whom he started a romantic relationship after his brother’s death.”

Pentagon Admits Iran’s Nuclear Program Not Obliterated

July 3, 2025 at 9:45 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The Bulwark: “Last week, the White House insisted Iran’s nuclear program had been totally ‘obliterated’ and went to war against a low-confidence preliminary intelligence assessment that the program had only been set back a couple months. Now, the Pentagon has refined its timetable: Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters yesterday the strikes had set Iran back by up to two years.”

“Years beats months, of course. But the new estimate is an official acknowledgment that Trump—despite his asserting that ‘I don’t see them being back involved in the nuclear business anymore’ and his other claims about the success of the bombing—will likely have tough choices ahead.”

White House Planning Signing Ceremony for Megabill

July 3, 2025 at 9:39 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

The White House is planning a Friday 9 a.m. ET signing ceremony for the budget reconciliation bill, Punchbowl News reports.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Debt Bomb

July 3, 2025 at 8:49 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman: “And that’s why I was a deficit dove in, say, 2011. America needed to run substantial deficits to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. But I didn’t think this would cause trouble down the road, because we were a serious country run by serious people, easily able to do what was necessary to stabilize the debt once the economic emergency was past.”

“But that, as I said, was then.”

“Right now we are running big budget deficits even though we aren’t fighting a war, facing high unemployment, or dealing with a pandemic. We should be taking action to bring those deficits down. Instead, Republicans have rammed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will add trillions to the deficit even as it causes mass misery. Money aside, the way Congress was bullied into passing that bill and the lies used to sell it show that we are no longer a serious country run by serious people.”

“Republicans are using transparently dishonest accounting to hide just how much they’re adding to debt — hey, we aren’t really cutting taxes, just extending tax cuts that were scheduled to expire. And they’re also claiming that the OBBBA’s tax cuts (the ones that they say aren’t really happening) will generate a miraculous surge in economic growth… Add in Trump’s bizarro claims about what his tariffs will achieve. Again, do we look like a serious country run by serious people?”

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Can’t Win Technique: The “can’t win technique” is a campaign strategy used during the primary season.

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan 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.

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