Make Tommy Massie the next Liz Cheney
The House passed the Big Beautiful Bill by one vote on Thursday following two months of melodrama. The Senate will take it up next.
I have a little song for those congressmen who wished the bill would reduce the deficit more but also wanted a ban on taxing Social Security:
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you’ll find
You get what you need
Tommy Massie can’t get no satisfaction? He needs to be Liz Cheney’d because for all his high-fallutin’ talk about his principles, when the time came to write a bill that would try to rein in an out-of-control federal spending machine, Tommy was drafting his speech denouncing whatever the outcome would be.
The best he could do was say, “This bill is a debt bomb ticking.”
Massie needs to apprentice under Senator John N. Kennedy or at least watch a few Foghorn Leghorn cartoons because Massie’s sentences are about as soggy as a used tea bag, which is fitting since he is about as sharp as a pound of wet liver.
The reality is that Congress is too divided to stop the spending. We still are living in LBJ’s Great Society. To pay for it, we are borrowing a buck for every dollar we raise in taxes.
Teddy Roosevelt sized up Massie 115 years ago:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
TR got in the arena. He was a pugilist. He charged San Juan Hill. As a presidential candidate in 1912, he took a bullet for our country—and continued his campaign speech for an hour before seeking medical treatment.
He also was adult enough to use reason. In his cowboy years out in the Dakotas, TR calmed down the Marquis de Morès who had just about challenged him to a duel. The Frenchman liked to duel. (It’s a terrific story.)
Roosevelt wrote back:
“Most emphatically, I am not your enemy; if I were, you would know it, for I would be an open one and would not have asked you to my house nor gone to yours. As your final words, however, seem to imply a threat, it is due to myself to say that the statement is not made through any fear of possible consequences to me; I too, as you know, am always on hand and ever ready to hold myself accountable in any way for anything I have said or done.”
Situation defused.
The men and the women now in the arena took the lies from the left while Massie the effete took praise from the press. The boos in the arena were loud and came from all corners.
Consider this report on May 15 in the Boston Herald:
Hundreds of thousands of Bay State children and seniors could go hungry if congressional Republicans carry through with their plan to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the Healey administration is warning.
Lower chamber lawmakers are attempting to cover the cost of implementing President Donald Trump’s signature first-term 2017 tax cuts by slashing several government programs, and the “big beautiful bill” touted by the U.S. president could end up costing the Bay State nearly $710 million in food assistance funding annually, Gov. Maura Healey warned Thursday.
It’s a cost no state is prepared to suddenly bear, she said.
Massachusetts has a state budget of $61.3 billion—nearly 100 times the alleged cut. If you cannot trim 1% of your budget, resign.
What Massie fails to understand is not many people in Congress agree with him and fewer like him. This mission required gamecocks with spurs, not peacocks a-strutting.
Even the Jeff Bezos Washington Post understood the situation, reporting on March 6:
Speaker Mike Johnson has guided the first step of President Donald Trump’s plan to remake much of the U.S. economy through the House, but Republicans in Congress still face significant headwinds before they can pass their “big, beautiful bill” on taxes, immigration, energy and defense.
A band of New York Republicans has made clear to Johnson (R-Louisiana) that any GOP tax bill must raise the cap on state and local tax deductions, or SALT. A handful of conservative hard-liners have competing demands that the legislation must reduce the national debt. More moderate members have voiced concerns about proposed cuts to social safety net programs, including Medicaid. Rep. Thomas Massie (Kentucky), a leading budget hawk, has already signaled he opposes the whole thing—and U.S. DOGE Service overseer Elon Musk appears to agree.
After a brief honeymoon, Republicans are coming to grips with the fact that despite chalking up an early legislative win, internal divisions could still sink Trump’s agenda and imperil their majority in the 2026 midterm elections.
The House is divided. It really can fall. That’s the reality and the name of the game is compromise.
My proof is in the House itself. It was a compromise between the big states and little ones to get the Constitution passed, which was not an easy feat considering very good men like Patrick Henry opposed it. The big states wanted a House that reflected population. The little states wanted a Senate that reflected the states equally.
And so the compromises were made. The bill is large and it falls short of its many goals. All compromises do. A compromise is measured by who is satisfied in the end. If nobody is satisfied, then it is a success.
Still not convinced the Big Beautiful Bill is worth it? Well, Billy Boy Kristol opposes it.
The speaker and the president worked hard getting this through.
The Hill reported two weeks ago:
House Republicans are falling further apart in negotiations on a reconciliation package that represents President Trump’s first-year legislative agenda, with just weeks to go before their self-imposed deadline.
GOP lawmakers sent conflicting signals Wednesday on how to cut Medicaid, indicating they were no closer to a deal on one of the biggest points in their internal negotiations.
On another key issue, raising the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, they lost ground in talks to reach a compromise.
Republicans said they would pass a package Trump has described as his “big, beautiful bill” by the Memorial Day recess, which was always seen as an ambitious goal.
With the first full week of May nearly at a close, they appear to have their work cut out for them.
That is what Speaker Johnson and President Trump faced. They succeeded in the House. The Senate is next.
What is in the bill ahead of Senate amendments?
Trump tweeted, “THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL has PASSED the House of Representatives! This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country! The Bill includes MASSIVE Tax CUTS, No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, Tax Deductions when you purchase an American Made Vehicle, along with strong Border Security measures, Pay Raises for our ICE and Border Patrol Agents, Funding for the Golden Dome, TRUMP Savings Accounts for newborn babies, and much more!”
Massie sat on the sidelines. Primary him and if that costs Republicans the seat in the general election, so what? Tommy’s vote wasn’t there when Republicans needed him most. He sided with Democrats—just as he did on making Johnson speaker. Massie has his principles? The only principle I see is spelled M-A-S-S-I-E.
Until the public gets the point that the over spending can’t go on indefinitely we will continue to elect representatives who will promise to spend more.
We have been screwed for a long time. It’s just now starting to get to the painful part.
We are now a country (I can't accurately describe us as a "nation" at this point) of 350,000,000 people, many (most?) of whom have no idea how governance is supposed to work under our Constitution and all of whom are interested primarily in what's in it for them. This includes the people who are supposed to represent our interests. That anything gets done under these circumstances is miraculous. Ever since we decided it was a good idea to vote ourselves rich, with the encouragement of our political class who cater to this whim in order to get elected we have been on a trajectory of ruin and destruction. You can only eat so much of your seed corn until there is nothing left to plant. So to a certain extent I can appreciate Massie's braying, although personally I find his sanctimony hard to take. It is disturbing to realize that we are, in the words of His Greatness, Mark Steyn, "the brokest nation in the history of the world." Yet here we are. Trump, whom I love dearly is doing what he promised and would likely be doing more cost-cutting but for the fact that he is opposed by approximately half of the people in this benighted country as well as all of the corporate media and democrat party members and voters. He is like the coxswain of a college scull in which half the rowers are pulling in one direction and the others pulling opposite to them. Under present circumstances, to make any progress toward the goal of fiscal sanity seems unlikely at best. But God bless him, Trump is doing all he can and he does deserve our support.