Beshear: Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' 'is wrong and it is mean.'

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT and KEA/NEA Retiree

We’re about to find out if, as Sen. Mitch McConnell claims, voters will "get over" deep Medicaid cuts that are a centerpiece of what President Donald Trump calls his "Big Beautiful Bill."

Not surprisingly, not to me, anyway, enough of the House GOP uber-right-wing recalcitrants joined the usual genuflectors to pass the Senate version of the bill the House approved in May.

In an email, the Kentucky Democratic Party called the legislation the "big ugly betrayal." I can go with that, too.

Anyway, the email hit the lowest of the low points for Kentucky (which Trump carried in blowouts all three time he ran for president.)

Closes 35 rural hospitals (more than [in] any [other] state)
Endangers health care for 1.5 MILLION Kentuckians
Cuts food assistance for 575,000 Kentuckians (including 225,000 children)
Gives billionaires massive tax breaks while Kentucky’s working families suffer

The email backstops Gov. Andy Beshear's dissection of the bill on Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show Monday night. He warned that the measure “would be absolutely devastating to Kentucky” and to “all of rural America.” We're talking deepest Trumpistan, folks.

Beshear cited the 35 threatened rural medical centers. He said "each and every one of them is the second largest employer" in its community. He pointed out that when a number two job provider goes under, “your entire community’s economy takes a major hit.”

Ask the citizens of Mayfield, my hometown, about big job hits. Nineteen years before the 2021 killer tornado devastated a wide swath of the Graves County seat, the big Continental-General Tire factory north of town closed. With more than 2,000 people on the payroll at its peak, the plant was one of the Jackson Purchase region's largest employers, rivaled only by the gaseous diffusion nuclear plant near Paducah.

Beshear asked viewers to imagine they’re small business owners in a county that loses its number two employer. “You may be laying some people off as well.” In the years following the tire plant’s demise, a slew of small businesses in Mayfield didn’t just furlough staff. They closed.

When the twister hit, nearly all of the retail stores that occupied all four sides of the court square in General Tire's heyday were gone.

Proportionately, the loss of a hospital in a small, lightly populated county would be as disastrous as the loss of the Mayfield tire plant. (The Paducah nuke plant is also closed but is in the long process of cleanup.)

Beshear also said it doesn’t matter what kind of insurance you have if your local hospital shuts. You’ll have to drive elsewhere – maybe “a couple of hours” -- to see the same kind of doctor you saw before. So the closure of a hospital in a small county is a hazard to the financial and physical health of that county's residents.

He added that in Kentucky, not one of the country's better-heeled states, half of the children are on Medicaid. So are many elderly Kentuckians.

Beshear didn’t pull punches about the legislation. “It is wrong and it is mean and I cannot believe that people refuse to do their job and represent their people that they were sent to Washington to represent and instead are just pledging fealty toward someone pushing such a damaging piece of legislation.”

Four of Kentucky’s five Republican House members obeyed Dear Leader and voted for the bill. Rep. Thomas Massie said he voted no because the measure would balloon the deficit. Ditto for Sen. Rand Paul.

Rep. Morgan McGarvey, Kentucky’s lone Democrat on Capitol Hill, also turned thumbs-down on the bill on its substance. "It is going to hurt every single Kentuckian." WLKY quoted him. "If you go to a hospital, if you have a kid in a public school, if you have someone in your family who uses Medicaid and Medicare for their health insurance, you know, a veteran who uses a nation's premier anti-hunger program to make sure they have a meal at night, this bill is going to help those people."

The bill hearkens to the era of the old Robber Barons and their hirelings in government, the media and the pulpit who preached that if you were poor, it was your own fault and that government had no obligation to help those who needed help. Nay, they brayed, government's chief function was to enrich the already rich.

"The One Big Beautiful Bill Act would issue the largest transfer of wealth from working-class Americans to the ultrawealthy in the nation’s history," says the Center for American Progress. That, of course, is the bill's main purpose.

Trump's Plug Ugly is the latest salvo fired in the Republican-corporate right's nine-decade-long holy war against the New Deal and its legacy, including Medicaid and Medicare.

The president "is seeking to do what several Republican predecessors failed to do: reverse the promise and the premises of Roosevelt’s New Deal," wrote Carl P. Leubsdorf in The Dallas Morning News. "....Besides its immediate impact, Roosevelt’s New Deal set the example for future presidents to expand the federal government’s role in stimulating the economy, regulating business, providing services and aiding the jobless.

"His underlying theory was that the Great Depression showed individual Americans need help from the federal government, and the country’s well-being requires greater regulation of private enterprise.

"By 1939, his administration’s enactment of Social Security, including unemployment insurance, and a law setting a minimum wage and maximum hours created the safety net that has protected individual Americans ever since."

In a speech, FDR answered New Deal critics by declaring, "The easiest way to summarize the reason for this extension of Government functions, local, State and national, is to use the words of Abraham Lincoln: 'The legitimate object of Government is to do for the people what needs to be done but which they cannot by individual effort do at all, or do so well, for themselves.'"

Lincoln, it will be recalled, was the first Republican president. But the GOP of "Lincoln and Liberty, too" -- the party that abolished slavery, made Blacks citizens and put the ballot in the hands of Black men -- is long gone, replaced by the MAGA GOP, the Only Rich White Lives Matter party.

"Racially, the impact [of Trump's budget bill] is stark," LaToya Parker and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad wrote in In These Times. "Black families hold less than 5 percent of U.S. wealth, despite making up over 13 percent of households. And the median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax would be a massive wealth transfer to the already wealthy, doing nothing for the 99.9 percent of Americans — especially Black households — who are far less likely to inherit wealth."

Trump ran the three most racist presidential campaigns since George Wallace in 1968. When Trump vowed to "Make America Great Again," he meant "Make America White Again."

"The Great Emancipator" must be spinning in his Springfield tomb.