Republican Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday that despite voting in favor of the sweeping tax and spending package, she wants the House to return the “One Big Beautiful Bill” to the Senate for further work.
“My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” Murkowski told reporters today.
Murkowski’s vote was pivotal in the Senate’s razor-thin 51–50 passage of the bill. The Alaska senator had been the focus of intense lobbying by GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, to secure her support amid concerns over Medicaid cuts and food assistance reductions. The bill now heads to the House, where its future remains uncertain.
You voted for the worst bill in American history. Now you own it. Leave your blubbering to the whalers. As Frank Vyan Walton over at Daily Kos puts it:
And the worst part is Lisa Murkowski who flipped her opposition to the bill at the last minute in exchange for an exception on SNAP and Medicaid cuts for Alaska, as if these cuts were too bad for Alaska to tolerate, but not for any other state.
Just Shut Up-Part Two. Rep. Brendan Boyle beat me to it:
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) drew friendly fire from within his state’s congressional delegation, with Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) slamming him for his comments about missing his family’s “entire trip to the beach” during the megabill vote-a-rama.
“If you are here, you are damned lucky and privileged to be here. You should want to be here, and if you don’t want to be here, leave,” Boyle said in an interview with The Bulwark posted on Tuesday.
Trump Wants To Deport All His Enemies. Elon Musk:
The president suggested Tuesday that he’s open to giving his biggest financier the boot, telling reporters before boarding Marine One that his administration would “have to take a look” at getting the South African out of the country.
“We might have to put DOGE on Elon,” Trump said. “You know what DOGE is? DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible. He gets a lot of subsidies.”
Responding to the video Tuesday, Musk posted on X: “So tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.”
Musk has spent the last several days elevating opposition to the bill and its contents. Late Monday night, the billionaire retweeted a post claiming that “ELON NEVER WANTED AN EV MANDATE OR SUBSIDIES,” pointing to a 2022 interview in which Musk argued that ending the electric vehicle mandate would improve Tesla’s performance.
“Removal of funding for enforcement of federal contempt of court orders is the actual crux of this spending bill,” Musk wrote. “This is nominally aimed at removal of illegal immigrants, but obviously also enables many other abuses of power by the President.”
Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani if as mayor he follows through on pledges not to assist federal officials enforcing immigration laws.
“Well then, we’ll have to arrest him,” Trump told reporters on July 1 while visiting a detention center in Florida. Trump said that he would “be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.”
Trump also said “a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” (where have we heard THAT before?) which is false. Mamdani is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Uganda, who immigrated to the United States with his parents − film director Mira Nair and Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani − at the age of seven.
“His statements don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you,” Mamdani said. “We will not accept this intimidation.”
Paul Krugman: “We’re All Rats Now”. Please read this and, if so inclined, take action:
And now that they’re in office, you can see the resurgence of raw racism all across Trump administration policies, large and small. You can see it, for example, in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared
I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.
You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery.
You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.
So racism and bigotry are back, big time. Who’s safe? Nobody.
Are you a legal immigrant? Well, the Supreme Court just allowed Trump to summarily strip half a million U.S. residents of that status, and only a fool would imagine that this is the end of the story. Anyway, when masked men who claim to be ICE agents but refuse to show identification are grabbing people off the streets because they think those people look illegal, does legal status even matter? Does it even matter if you’re a U.S. citizen?
And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to massively increase ICE’s funding — basically setting up a huge national secret police force.
Gotta love a good typo. From WDEL:
Both Delaware and Wilmington are in the mist of organizing 250th celebrations for 2026.
Hope they don’t get waterlogged while they’re at it.
Finally, You Can Buy Pot Starting August 1. Adding, need I remind anybody, a pretty significant revenue stream for the State:
A month from now, people can walk into a store in Delaware and buy marijuana for recreational use, finally ending a protracted delay for retail sales in a state that legalized weed in April 2023.
While Delaware has authorized 30 recreational licenses for retail sales, those are still in the process of getting approved and will not open on Aug. 1.
Instead, the sales will start at the 13 medical marijuana dispensaries that have been granted so-called conversion licenses to kickstart the regulated commercial market.
I Give Matt Meyer some credit on this. He brought in someone who was both committed to, and capable of implementing, a recreational marijuana industry.
What do you want to talk about?