And yet, despite all that, the Senate passed the bill, putting it on the path to being signed into law by United States President Donald Trump later this week.
Welcome to American democracy in 2025.
We often think of the January 6, 2021, insurrection or Trump using presidential authority to punish his political enemies as the signs of democratic decline in the US.
But another illustration of America’s broken democracy is that policies enacted by government leaders often aren’t anywhere close to the public’s views and preferences, while policies that voters really want remain stalled.
“In a real democracy, the people would get what they want most of the time, and bills as deeply unpopular as Trump’s BBB would never pass,” said Max Berger of Democracy Revival Action, a group that works on efforts to strengthen democracy in the US. BBB is shorthand for “big, beautiful bill”, the moniker Republicans have given to the legislation.
An overwhelming majority of Americans favour raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy – and few want them cut.
Yet Republicans insisted on passing tax cuts for the richest in 2017, the last time the party controlled the House, Senate and the presidency. This week’s bill will make those cuts permanent and provide some additional tax benefits to those who need them least.
Why is the Government so out of whack with the country’s real needs and desires?
Part of the problem is today’s Republican Party – and not just Trump.
As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explain in their 2020 book, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, GOP politicians at the state and national levels campaign largely on social issues such as immigration, but once in office, enact tax cuts for the wealthy and limits on the regulations of businesses.
Republican politicians are fully aware that a plutocratic economic agenda isn’t popular.
But their campaign donors want it, and many of the lawmakers themselves fervently believe in lower taxes.
So they implement controversial economic policies betting that they still win elections on social issues – helped by massive campaign contributions from the wealthy and corporations thankful that Republican officials have cut regulations and taxes.
Trump, for example, didn’t discuss cuts in Medicaid and food stamp funding on the campaign trail much last year and probably won’t next year, either.
The Republican approach is akin to if the Democrats ran on raising the minimum wage (a fairly popular proposal) but then inserted reparations for the descendants of the enslaved (fairly unpopular) into a 1000-page bill.
This insistence on passing policies that they know the public opposes shows that Republicans are wary of interest groups, journalists, and others closely examining their proposals.
So Trump’s domestic bill is being passed in the same way that legislation goes through in Republican-controlled states across the country: bills are written in secret and voted on as quickly as possible after their release.
Hearings, expert witnesses, town hall meetings, and other forms of deliberation and debate that used to be part of the legislative process are increasingly falling by the wayside because the Republican agenda would wilt under such scrutiny.
“The reason they are moving so quickly is because the more the public learns about the bill, the more they oppose it,” said University of Michigan policy professor Don Moynihan.
And pushing flawed, unpopular bills means the party at times must take unusual and fairly unethical approaches to get legislation through.
Republicans spent the past few days trying to exempt Alaska from some of the cuts in the bill and offer the state specific benefits to win the vote of Senator Lisa Murkowski (Republican-Alaska). They also used an accounting gimmick to downplay how much the bill costs.
But the problems of our legislative process go beyond the fact that today’s Republicans are so extreme and unprincipled.
The combination of the filibuster and virtually no regulations on campaign spending by the rich and corporations means little legislation passes in Congress and what makes it through often reflects the priorities of the wealthy instead of the broader public.
Whenever they control the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans jam as many policies as possible into yearly “reconciliation” bills that can pass with a simple majority to get around the filibuster.
This is terrible for average Americans who could more easily understand and express their opinions on different pieces of legislation being passed gradually instead of mega-bills covering a wide range of issues that are voted on at once.
We have Republican members of Congress who represent very poor states pushing cuts to Medicaid and corporate taxes and Democratic members who are passionate about defending Israel and the cryptocurrency industry. Those aren’t the priorities of their constituents.
When you put all of this together, you end up with legislation that most everyone hates and also knows will almost certainly pass.
You can’t have a strong democracy with a President and major party who don’t respect election results or independent institutions such as universities and the media.
But while Trump and other Republican politicians are the most obvious problems with American democracy today, they aren’t the only problems.
Making America truly democratic will almost certainly require getting rid of the filibuster, super PACs, and other features of modern US politics that Americans have come to accept as normal.
The so wrongfully named “big, beautiful bill” is actually showing how ugly, unaccountable and unequal our policymaking process has become.
