Of course Smiling Josh Hawley, first to cave, will vote for the Big Ugly Bill | Opinion
Smiling Josh Hawley just did what we knew he would do all along, which is find a way to support the Big Ugly Bill about which he had so many many concerns as a Big Fake Man of the People.
On Saturday night, only two Republicans, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted with Democrats to block consideration of this monstrosity.
A month ago, when our senior senator was running around saying he would never, no, not ever, vote for a bill that cut Medicaid, I wrote that if you offered me half of Elon Musk’s holdings to tell you what Hawley truly believes, I would not be able to cash the check. And that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hawley’s idea of “no cuts” to Medicaid and mine were not identical.
So here he comes on Saturday, the first of those with “concerns” to cave, announcing that the deep Medicaid cuts contained in the bill, which he has criticized so many times, won’t keep him from voting for The Thing after all.
Because, you see, its harms to Missourians will be delayed. Even if true, what about harms to other vulnerable Americans? What was it he said about such cuts being “morally wrong and politically suicidal”?
He was definitely right about that first part: This bill would extend $4 trillion in tax cuts that heavily favor the weathy. It would pay to begin construction of the “Golden Dome” missile defense and fund the extremely expensive mass deportation of many migrants who, as you can already see from daily news coverage, are not criminals at all. And yes it is the poor who will pay, with more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, the nutrition program that used to be called food stamps. The wealth gap would widen under this bill.
After the Congressional Budget Office said in a preliminary analysis of the still-changing Senate text that it would cut Medicaid by $930 billion, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden of Oregon said in a Saturday statment that “these cruel cuts to Americans’ health care will strike a mortal blow to rural health care, and threaten the health and safety of kids, seniors, Americans with disabilities, and working families across the country. Life and death decisions of this magnitude should not be subjected to this rushed and reckless process.” A minute ago, Hawley knew this.
Yet here Hawley was on Saturday, explaining that he will be a “yes” vote on final passage because we’re supposedly going to be getting ours:
“With the delay in the provider tax framework that we were able to get and with the changes to the rural hospital fund, Missouri’s Medicaid dollars will actually increase over the next four years. So we will get more money — Medicaid funding — over baseline until 2030. Any changes to our provider framework in Missouri will not take place until the next decade.
“I want to be clear, I’m going to spend the next however long trying to make sure that the cuts that we have successfully delayed never take place. I think that this effort to cut Medicaid funding is a mistake. We’ve been able for Missouri to delay it. As I said, we’re actually going to get more money in the next four years. But that’s not true of all the states.”
So you’re going along with this colossal mistake. Why? Because low-income adults and families, pregnant women, disabled people and seniors in those states don’t matter? You actually know how bad this bill is, Senator, which compounds the injury.
Next time — and for the “next however long” — don’t even bother pretending to care.
This story was originally published June 28, 2025 at 5:40 PM.
