A Protester Stormed The Senate And Told Republicans, 'You People Are Awful!'

"You people are awful!" a protester in the Senate gallery screamed as Republicans worked to pass Trump's bill.

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Trump and Republicans have been flat out lying about their cuts to Medicaid, saying no one will lose coverage, but not everyone is fooled.

A protester interrupted Republican efforts to pass Donald Trump’s bill just after 7PM Sunday evening, yelling that they are awful, horrible people.

“You people are awful,” the unidentified heckler yelled. “You’re awful! You’re awful.”

The interruption came at the end of Senator Sanders’ (I-VT) speech opposing the bill and calling it corrupt.

Republicans are cutting $600-880 billion from Medicaid, which will close rural hospitals, community clinics and more on top of throwing millions of people off of healthcare.

Contrary to their claims, Republicans aren’t focused on kicking “illegals” off of Medicaid or getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse, mostly because undocumented immigrants are largely not eligible for Medicaid and only some legally present immigrants even qualify for Medicaid.

“In reality, the bill cuts spending on Medicaid by at least $600 billion over the next 10 years. What Republicans say are measures to curb “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the program are largely administrative hurdles intended to bog down potential recipients in paperwork and red tape in order to complicate enrollment in the programs,” Rolling Stone wrote on June 2.

Yes, there have been changes to the Big Betrayal Bill since then, but surprise! Those changes have not cut down on the red tape and inefficient bureaucracy Republicans are deliberately inflicting on Americans so they can give Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk a permanent tax cut. Oh, but waiters will also get a tax cut (the amount of which would not cause them to need to make hundreds of billions of cuts to healthcare programs). Please know that they really care about ::a few tokens:: of the working class.

Republicans keep claiming that no one is going to lose their coverage. This is a flat out lie.

“You’ve got about 4.8 million people on Medicaid right now nationwide who are able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are not working, who are taking advantage of the system. If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you are defrauding the system. You’re cheating the system,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on May 25.

Republicans label the Big Betrayal Bill as “protecting” Medicaid, when it takes hundreds of billions from it.

One example Johnson gave to justify his party’s cuts to Medicaid is that the Republican bill would “return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.”

But the Washington Post dug down into the claims on May 30, and they found that the Republicans were not discussing the change to the 55-64 age group.

Matt VanHyfte, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s communications director, “acknowledged adding work requirements for the 55-to-64 age group is big shift from 2023. But he said the policy is drafted to ‘more explicitly exempt people with disabilities on a broader scale.’”

The Post’s bottom line on the Republican claim that people are refusing to work is that a temporary CBO take said 4.8 million would lose Medicaid if House version of the bill passed, and Republicans took that to mean that those people are not working now and are cheating the system.

However, in the last 24 hours the CBO released much worse numbers for the bill: The “big, beautiful bill” could cut insurance coverage for nearly 12 million people and add $3.3 trillion in debt:

A sprawling budget bill in the US Senate could cut health insurance coverage for nearly 12 million Americans and add $3.3tn (£2.4tn) in debt, according to new estimates..

The CBO numbers calculate $1tn in cuts to healthcare funding if the measure passes.

If they were actually “protecting” Medicaid, why would they be lying about who gets Medicaid and why can’t they point to actual evidence of waste, fraud and abuse that their bill targets?

If they were really “protecting” Medicaid, they would keep the funding the same while stopping coverage for those who were “gaming the system.” After all, Republicans have failed to demonstrate that there is $600 billion worth of gaming the system.

But we do know they have been charged by Trump with hunting down money to justify his tax cuts for the rich, which they do not plan to pay for but seek to at least be able to play the shell game of waving a hand toward a stack of empty folders to justify the tax cut.

Republicans might also need nearly $1 trillion according to the Cato Institute, which explains why they think the $168 billion for immigration and border law enforcement cited by the CBO isn’t the whole story, for kidnapping people who might or might not be immigrants, might or might not be undocumented and certainly are not all “criminals” and sending them to place unknown.

The Cato Institute raises several points on this matter:

However, the CBO’s cost estimate is deficient in three ways. First, CBO assumes that all this increase is temporary, and second, it will happen gradually over the next 10 years, rather than in an immediate, reckless spending spree. Most importantly, it neglects the more significant cost of removing immigrants who would have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits. Properly considered, the actual cost of H.R. 1’s immigration enforcement spending is nearly $1 trillion more than the CBO estimates. When seen in the context of the overall costs of the bill, mass deportation would account for almost a quarter of the bill’s total price tag.

It’s ironic that Republicans get elected running against red tape and deficits and then immediately seek to make the government more inefficient and add more than $2 trillion over 10 years to federal budget deficits, but it makes sense when we pay attention to just when they choose to do this.

Republicans are against red tape when it comes to regulations, as they see regulations for the safety of Americans are undue burdens on big corporations. They are for red tape when it comes to an 80-year-old in a wheelchair in a rural nursing home or a disabled person needing to prove - again - that they cannot work.

Republicans are against deficits when it comes to SNAP, Medicaid and Medicare, but for deficits when it comes to a huge welfare entitlement via tax breaks for the very elite.

In other words, Republicans don’t have fiscal values or even small government values anymore. Those words are still used as a stamp, branding if you will, for nefarious dismantling of basic social safety net features that helped to define this country as a decent place to live, as a “first world” developed country. But they do not actually care about fiscal soundness.

Republicans have become, as a body, reactionary nihilists doing the bidding of oligarchs.

Much like how abortions have gone UP since the Republican-backed Dobbs decision, the values Republicans pretend to have in order to justify cruelty and theft don’t track with their policies.

Where are the alleged family values now? Where’s the oft-claimed moral high ground? Where’s the purported passion for fetuses?

They Bay Area protested the Big Betrayal Bill over the weekend in front of a Tesla store. Some people don’t forget.

“You people are awful!” sums up a majority of Americans’ take on this horrible bill, that even has people in a Trump 69.2 district angry.

Caveat: As the bill goes through markups, it changes. The numbers from one moment to the next can change. But at all points, the majority of Republicans in both chambers have pushed for the egregious cuts and justified them with outrageously offensive lies.

Share your thoughts on the protester’s message for Senate Republicans in the comments below.