The public tends to dislike big budget bills, and the way they’re passed.
President Donald Trump is about to achieve his biggest legislative victory yet: his “one big, beautiful bill” — the massive tax- and Medicaid-cutting, immigration and border spending bill passed the Senate on Tuesday — is on the verge of passing the House of Representatives.
It’s a massive piece of legislation, likely to increase the national debt by at least $3 trillion, mostly through tax cuts, and leave 17 million Americans without health coverage — and it’s really unpopular. Majorities in nearly every reputable poll taken this month disapprove of the bill, ranging from 42 percent who oppose the bill in an Ipsos poll (compared to 23 percent who support) to 64 percent who oppose it in a KFF poll.
And if history is any indication, it’s not going to get any better for Trump and the Republicans from here on out.
In modern American politics, few things are more unpopular with the public than big, messy bills forged under a bright spotlight. That’s especially true of bills passed through a Senate mechanism called “budget reconciliation,” a Senate procedure that allows the governing party to bypass filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. They tend to have a negative effect on presidents and their political parties in the following months as policies are implemented and campaign seasons begin.
Part of that effect is due to the public’s general tendency to dislike any kind of legislation as it gets more publicity and becomes better understood. But reconciliation bills in the modern era seem to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: forcing presidents to be maximally ambitious at the outset, before they lose popular support for the legislation and eventually lose the congressional majorities that delivered passage.Presidents and their parties tend to be punished after passing big spending bills
The budget reconciliation process, created in 1974, has gradually been used to accomplish broader and bigger policy goals. Because it offers a workaround for a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, it has become the primary way that presidents and their parties implement their economic and social welfare visions.
The public, however, doesn’t tend to reward the governing party after these bills are passed. As political writer and analyst Ron Brownstein recently pointed out, presidents who successfully pass a major reconciliation bill in the first year of their presidency lose control of Congress, usually the House, the following year.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan lost his governing majority in the House after using reconciliation to pass large spending cuts as part of his Reaganomics vision (the original “big, beautiful” bill).
