A Mostly Unnoticed Horror in This Most Horrible of Bills

“This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.” [i]

There is an abundance of items in this bill to provoke disgust. The work requirement provision of the Medicaid portion of Trump’s BBB assumes that healthcare is something to be earned. The last thing they want us to discover is that access to adequate healthcare is a right, something that everyone, by their very humanity, is entitled to receive. In the Orwellian world of the MAGA forces who currently control all three branches of government, the rights of the morbidly rich are the only ones Congress should be protecting. So the humongous tax cuts which will add trillions to the debt are promoted as needing no explanation or rationale. The unspoken assumption is that their very wealth creates their right to prodigious cuts. Except for the bigger gas lighters in the Republican Congressional Caucus, there is no serious attempt to re-advocate tax cuts as growers of the economy. We’ve been down that road too often to be told that we need cuts to stimulate the economy. Repeatedly previous cuts have resulted in the plowing of retrained monies overwhelmingly into stock buybacks and the like rather than investments. The Republicans, from Donald Trump down, care not at all about history, thank you. The only reason Republicans vote for tax cuts that reward the very people who least need them is that the Republicans are simply repaying them for providing the funding that puts them in Congress and keeps them there.

While the murderous cuts to Medicaid and the massive elimination of Medicare funds which the debt increase will trigger have drawn most of the attention, one particularly outrageous feature of this horror of a bill has been relatively little noticed. That is the catastrophic increase in the funding of ICE’s mass deportation atrocity. When even the vast majority of the American public finds this operation especially repugnant, how can the Congress be increasing funding for ICE and the other agencies engaged in the terrorizing of the undocumented and their supporters across the nation. Yet Republican representatives and senators have, with precious few exceptions, prepared to provide the financial support to carry out Stephen Miller’s demonic crusade to prevent non-white people from replacing the true Americans. That may be, in Miller’s fevered brain, the ideal realization of nativism’s most despicable fantasies about radically reshaping the country’s demographics. The final solution, if you will, to the perils of a multi-racial democracy. To most of us, Miller and Homan’s mass deportation project is a moral disgrace and economic disaster. But that is what the Republicans in the Congress are perfectly prepared to do: to fund this nation-wide infliction of cruel and unusual punishment with the worst possible consequences.

Looking for waste and fraud? Here is one of the greatest venues for money making, through lucrative contracts for private prisons, including the newly opened tent concentration camp in the Florida everglades, a home front gulag, not intended to be hidden from the public, but to function as a showcase of prison porn for the MAGA masses who can never get enough of the most sadistic optics. And the crowning touch? The funds used to built this modern Auschwitz are coming out of FEMA’s budget. Talk about “owning the libs.” It doesn’t get any sweeter than this, for those with the conscience to bear it.

Our mad king seems most at home in Ice land. Yesterday he was in the Everglades of Florida for the ignominious opening of the new house of horrors which Homeland Security has purposely built for detainees in an area infested with alligators and snakes. Talking about the new inmates of “Alligator Alcatraz, Trump noted that “Many of them were born in this country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that is the next job we (Ron DeSantis) work on together.”[ii] Trump may not know that his attorney general, Pam Bondi, has already set in motion the steps needed to denaturalize undesirable people by establishing rules that are opaque enough to sanction stripping persons of citizenship pretty much as Bondi and Trump have indicated that they should.

And then there is J.D. Vance, surely the most dangerous vice-president this country has seen since the administration of James Buchanan when his Vice-President, John Breckenridge, was using his position to advance the interests of the new-born Confederacy (Breckinridge would eventually become a Confederate general). J.D. yesterday was in his most pontifical persona as he smugly instructed us not to sweat the “minutiae” of the bill. He was referring to the healthcare cuts which will take as many as 17 million off the rolls and stifle the growth of green energy. What J.D. wanted his audience to admire was the ballooning of the personnel and funding which the bill accords Homeland security, including ICE. That was what Vance was most proud about. It’s the ultimate owning of the libs.

In truth the bill provides $150 billion as a giant slush fund to continue on a vastly larger scale the lawless imprisonment and deportation of black- and brown skinned people kidnapped by masked persons in unmarked cars to arbitrarily meet the quotas which a xenophobic, kleptocratic administration has set for its timetable of remaking America through massive demographic subtraction.[iii] Expect a burgeoning industry for venture capitalists in the construction and management of “detention centers” for the unfortunate souls caught up in ICE’s dragnets.

They are being kept in overcrowded, ill-suited venues in which the detainees are treated inhumanely, beyond the reach of Congresspersons who are turned away from these facilities, lest they become witnesses to the abuses taking place. Reports indicate an increase of deaths in these “detention centers” Others are being spirited away to hellholes much removed from this country to keep them beyond the reach of U.S. law, which is increasingly becoming an oxymoron. All this the Republicans in the Congress have chosen to reward by this BBB.

We can rightly excoriate Vance for his fascist reveling in the abject misery of so many. But everyone who voted for this bill which empowers ICE to ruin so many more lives across the country, to make a mockery of the law and the due process it is supposed to assure, to expedite the moral and economic disaster that Trump has set in motion – every last one of the Republicans including Lisa Murkowski, has blood on her hands.

All three branches have shared responsibility for setting the nation on this terrible path. If there is any consolation, it is that, if the polling is to be believed, the sizeable majority of people in this country very much oppose this ethnic cleansing. One hopes against hope that in 2026 they will not repeat what occurred in 2024 – the mass amnesia, willed or not, which enabled scores of millions of voters to reelect a convicted felon whose previous administration had been such an unmitigated disaster, culminating in his inciting the insurrection to overturn the election of 2020. If there is any hope of fully restoring democracy to this country, the electorates of 2026 and 2028 need to live up to their civic responsibilities.

July 2, 2025

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[i] Quoted in Heather Cox Richardson, Letter from an American, June 30, 2025).

[ii] Thom Hartmann, “Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just a prison; it’s a mirror. And it’s asking us: Who are we, really?

[iii] “Reject the Gargantuan, Grotesque Giveaway, Public Citizen, June 30, 2025.