- RAWSTORY.COM - Raw Story - 08/Jul 10:53

'Queasy' Republicans dread next Trump fight after megabill bruising: analyst

Republicans are moving on after passing their so-called "big beautiful bill" — but it's not clear all of them have an appetite for this coming battle.Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is bracing Democrats for a fight over GOP intentions to claw back $9.4 billion in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting, saying the rescissions package was "beyond a bait-and-switch — it is a bait and poison-to-kill."Bloomberg's Laura Davison told MSNBC'S "Way Too Early" Tuesday that not all Republicans were on board to disagree with him."[Democrats are] ready to make a fight of it, and even some Republicans are feeling queasy about this," Davison said. "[Sen.] Susan Collins, who's the chair of the Appropriations Committee, has said that she, you know, wants to make some modifications to it, particularly that PEPFAR program, the HIV/AIDS prevention program."The White House package needs only a simple majority to pass through the Senate, but any measure to avoid a government shutdown before October would need Democratic support, which gives Schumer significant leverage."Here's the thing, that if Congress does not act on this by July 18, the funding continues as is, so that's one way that the Senate, in particular, could just essentially do a pocket veto of this plan and just move on because of some of the controversy surrounding it," Davison said.The domestic policy bill pushed by President Donald Trump made cuts to Medicaid and other crucial programs that serve millions of Americans, and Davison said Republicans might be reluctant to make additional cuts to the broadly popular NPR and PBS."This is really starting to become a problem for Republicans," she said. "The 'one big, beautiful bill,' that the tax and spending bill passed through Congress so fast, that so much of the drama and the focus was on the legislative procedure, on who was going to vote yes, who was going to vote no, and now people are broadly sort of waking up realizing what's in this package. "There's $1 trillion in cuts for Medicaid, SNAP benefits. These affect a lot of people, and if you look across a broad swath of polling the bill is not popular, and this is really rare. If you look in the lens of history for a tax cut bill to be unpopular, you know, if you go back decades, the Bush tax cuts were broadly popular with the American people. It wasn't until Trump's 2017 first-term tax cut that people started saying, 'Look, I don't know if these are, you know, good for the long-term debt trajectory of the country, I'm not seeing any benefits in here in this package for myself.'""This is skewed towards businesses and the wealthy, and this is going to be a political problem come the midterms and 2028 for Republicans," Davison added. - YouTube youtu.be