Why July 3rd was both a tragedy and a turning point
A fair reading of American history as of last Thursday is that it was stumbling forward and then calling for us, in this time, in this past week. It didn’t arrive to celebrate or elevate us, but to force us to clarify who we are and challenge us to reaffirm what we literally pledge (“liberty and justice for all”) to be about.
Living out our most hallowed ideals has never been easy. It’s highly doubtful America would have gained its independence from Great Britain and King George III without the leadership of George Washington, the general who became our first president, who also owned more [https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery] than a hundred slaves when he died. It’s a fact that leans uneasily against the moral elegance of the second paragraph of the July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Washington wasn’t alone in his contradictions. At least a dozen signers of the declaration, including Thomas Jefferson—who drafted the above sentence—were slave owners. Less than a hundred years later we would fight a bloody civil war over that festering impasse, leading to the deaths of well over a half million combatants, more casualties than from all other American wars combined.
It would be far better if we didn’t have to fight a civil war again. But a raw truth of our 21st century is we’ve gone from tumbling to cartwheeling backwards, including the grotesque “Unite the Right” torch-light rally in Charlottesville just months after Donald Trump’s first election, to the violent attempted insurrection at the capitol on 1/6/2021, to the cold-blooded murder of Minnesota Democratic party leader Melissa Hortman and her husband a couple weeks ago.
One metric of the pace is it was only six years ago that Iowa Congressman Steve King was sharply criticized and sanctioned (though not formally censured) by his Republican colleagues for giving voice to white supremacy. He lost his seat because he was defeated in the Republican primary in 2020. It’s hard to imagine King would face any consequences from his Republican brethren today.
There’s more to the Trump MAGA movement than racism, but racism is wrapped into its core; embedded in the grievance politics Trump has stoked for decades, including his years-long “birtherism” campaign to falsely attack the legitimacy of the nation’s first African-American president. It clearly infects his attitude toward immigrants—referring to African and Latin American nations as “shit-hole” countries of origin for unwanted refugees seeking asylum while ceremonially welcoming white South Africans fleeing that country’s post-apartheid regime.
On Thursday, the prolific and very public historian Heather Cox Richardson delivered a clear and rather blunt tutorial for her followers. It was a clear and short talk to make her point that the persisting threat to American democracy comes not from foreign enemies but from within.
Simply put, racism is antithetical to the core tenet of democracy—that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. The purposeful, caustic humor shaping the vibe of Trump’s culture war gives cover for those who mock and marginalize women and gay and transgender people, and denigrate those who advocate for the dignity of their lives and value to society.
In an another trademark of his toxicity divisiveness Trump has turned his populist movement against science, higher education, and journalism—all to stoke the notion that he is the savior of the real Americans who vote for him, and the warrior to deliver “retribution” to those who don’t. Suffice to say, it is a cynical, calculated appeal to our society’s worst instincts and it has devolved into the American tragedy of the 21st century.
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This is the context for the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) that narrowly passed Congress on July 3rd and was ceremoniously signed by Trump on Independence Day. At nearly 1,000 pages, the OBBBA’s key features include extensions of massive tax cuts (weighted toward the most wealthy Americans) enacted during the previous Trump term, and deep cuts into the Medicaid program and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that have significantly expanded access to health care for low income Americans, especially over the past decade. This massive transfer of wealth—away from health care and/or nutritional assistance for millions of the most vulnerable Americans to the bank accounts of the most wealthy—is the most profound feature of the legislation. But there are many other provisions which, if left in place, will also have drastic consequences.
For those who’d like a deeper dive into the details of the OBBBA’s reach and consequences, I offer this link to Ezra Klein’s interview with his former Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias—one of America’s premier explanatory journalists.
Leading up to the vote on the bill, Trump made statements which, on their face, reveal he either doesn’t understand or has chosen to misrepresent the most consequential features of the legislation, particularly what many regard as devastating cuts to Medicaid. You can read about that controversy here (CNN) and here. Beyond that, I’m going to skip the ‘he-said, she said’ ping-pong you can find virtually anywhere else on the internet.
The most telling takes on the legislation come from two Republican senators, one whom voted for the bill and another who denounced and voted against it.
The senator who voted for the bill is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who did so after privately negotiating with the bill’s drafters to carve out special benefits for Alaskans.
“I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests,” she told a reporter who caught up to her in a Senate hallway after she confirmed she would vote for the bill. “But I know, I know, that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that.”
“Not going to be advantaged.” Now there’s a phrase for the ages—a bit like saying more than 100 million Americans were not “advantaged” when they were infected with Covid-19.
The senator who voted against the bill was Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Here’s part of the statement he issued on June 28th:
“I will always do what is in the best interest of North Carolina, even when that puts me at odds with my own party. When Senate leaders of my party presented this bill, I did what every American should expect from their U.S. Senator: I worked to gather the facts and comprehensively analyze what the impact would be on the people I swore an oath to represent. I did my homework on behalf of North Carolinians, and I cannot support this bill in its current form. It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities. This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population. We can and must do better than this.”
Sen. Tillis’s statement was met with immediate criticism from the president who also said he would be working to find another Republican from North Carolina to challenge Tillis in a Republican primary election when the senator’s term expires. Tillis then announced his resignation from the Senate.
Despite efforts to deny and disguise them, a feature of the OBBBA is that it is poised to have snowballing and potentially devastating effects on the nation’s social landscape, especially when it comes to health care.
For example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and concurrent expansion of Medicaid has made health care available to millions of low-income Americans who would otherwise suffer without insurance. As importantly, these programs deliver the positive side-effect of enabling the solvency of thousands of rural clinics and hospitals for whom ACA and Medicaid funding (delivered as reimbursements for care provided to ACA and Medicaid enrollees) have been lifelines for solvency. (Washington Governor Bob Ferguson reports the state will lose “at least” $3 billion a year over the coming decade as a result of the OBBBA and that the cuts “will likely result in rural and urban hospital closures.”
In his July 3rd press release, Ferguson underscored that although a half million Washingtonians in eastern and central Washington are enrolled in Medicaid, the two members of Congress representing them—Republicans Michael Baumgartner (Spokane and the 5th district) and Dan Newhouse (Yakima and the 4th district)—both voted for the new law.
Another example is the massive amount of funding the law will deliver to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). Overall, the bill assigns nearly $170 billion for customs enforcement with $45 billion assigned for new detention facilities to imprison illegal immigrants prior to deportation.
A blatantly dishonest fear campaign—that America is being overrun by illegal immigrants from Latin America (read black and brown people) who ruthlessly assault legal Americans—is at the heart of the Trumpian movement. More than any other issue it is this racist propaganda that brought Trump to power twice, along with the promise in the 2024 campaign that a more aggressive ICE would focus, first, on rounding up, detaining and deporting known criminals. (It’s not exactly new—it is a larger version of the misleading and notoriously racist “Willie Horton” ad campaign that Lee Atwater created to help George H.W. Bush defeat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. )
But here’s the catch: what is actually happening is quite a bit different than what voters were told to expect. As a recent NBC investigation revealed, the data show that of the more than 185,000 people ICE has detained over the past eight months, only 65,041 of them have been convicted of crimes and, “the most common categories of crimes they committed were immigration and traffic offenses.” [] A Washington Post investigation, reported on July 3rd, corroborated the NBC findings.
So that’s a picture of now. The OBBBA funds approved by Congress will make the ICE the largest law enforcement agency in U.S. history with detention facilities exceeding those of the U.S. prison system.
It is a much larger force than one that would be necessary to pursue illegal immigrants convicted or suspected of committing violent crimes. It is clearly being used as a political foil already, and begs the question of how well and for how long Americans will tolerate an extraordinary national police presence whose leaders, and political patrons, will inevitably be under pressure to justify and defend its existence.
We got a glimpse of what’s at stake three weeks ago, in Los Angeles, the day U.S. Senator Alex Padilla was taken to the floor and handcuffed for trying to ask U.S. Homeland Security director Kristi Noem a question during a press event. Noem oversees ICE and has more than once gone on raids with ICE agents. Again, here’s part of what she said that day:
“We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this Governor Newsom and this mayor placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.”
It is telling that Noem, appearing before the Senate in late May, was asked by New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan about a central Constitutional protection habeas corpus (the so-called Great Writ of Liberty) that dates back to the dawn of the Enlightenment.
“Well,” Noem answered. “Habeas corpus is a Constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In short, Noem got it exactly backwards in terms of whose rights are protected. Sen. Hassan corrected her—“Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for how reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies, like America, from police states like North Korea.”
It was less clear, in January, when Trump was sworn in as President, again, whether that half of us Americans who didn’t vote for him would, or even could, be the force to restore the nation’s values, let alone its bearings. As the widespread and jam-packed demonstrations throughout the country have shown we are recovering not just from the depth of Trump’s racism, cruelty and incompetence but from the shock of having to acknowledge how much of our civility and aspirations have been trashed in the process.
It’s offensive. It’s a blow to the solar plexus and a punch in the mouth. It can’t be blinked away, like a bad dream, and we can’t excuse ourselves by stating or wishing it to be someone else’s problem. It’s our problem. It’s our future. We’ll do this.
Because we must.
—tjc
