The New Yorker:

Rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked.

By Susan B. Glasser

What’s in a name? Donald Trump, for whom appearances are everything, thinks it’s just about the only thing that matters. He called the single major piece of legislation associated with his second term “the One Big, Beautiful Bill,” a hokey bit of branding that his supporters on Capitol Hill promptly turned into the official name of the measure. There are signs that he does not know much about what’s in the $4.5 trillion megabill—during a last-minute lobbying session on Wednesday at the White House, Trump reportedly had to be reminded by a Republican member of Congress that the measure did in fact make major cuts to Medicaid despite Trump’s promises not to touch it. But the substance is never the point with Trump; the optics are.

So it was telling that the only victory on the floor that Democrats scored during the hours of drama this week leading up to Thursday’s final passage of the tax-cuts-for-the-rich, spending-cuts-for-the-poor bill was a last-ditch objection to Trump’s ill-fitting name for it. The Senate had just pulled an all-nighter to vote on an array of Democratic amendments to the measure—so many amendments, in fact, that, when the Senate took its forty-fifth vote on Tuesday morning, it broke its previous record for one of its so-called vote-a-ramas. All the Democratic-sponsored efforts to revise the legislation failed. But the Senate’s Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, insisted on one last symbolic complaint moments before the final vote was called: a parliamentary objection to Trump’s beloved name for the measure—which Schumer said was a violation of Senate budgetary rules. The parliamentarian agreed; the name was deleted from the official legislative text. “This is not a ‘big, beautiful bill’ at all,” Schumer told reporters soon after. “It is really the ‘big, ugly betrayal.’ ” And yet his parliamentary win could not have been more Pyrrhic; if there’s one thing Americans are likely to know about this sprawling bill, it’s not what’s in it—it’s the catchy title, which Trump and everyone else will continue to use. You’d think, after ten years, the opposition would have learned not to fight Trump on branding; you’d be wrong.

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