Democrats are reading from the same script, accusing Republicans of paying for tax cuts for the rich by slashing Medicaid.
Nearly four months into President Donald Trump’s second term, leaderless Democrats are still struggling to project a clear and persuasive message to win back the working-class and minority voters they lost in 2024.
Amid the intra-party war over strategic and generational change, they’re counting their blessings that there’s at least one thing they can all agree on: opposing Republicans ‘big, beautiful” legislative agenda.
And they’ve got their sound bites down.
According to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), if the bill passes, “little children will go hungry so that Jeff Bezos can buy a third yacht.”
That’s the new talking point among Democrats, who are opposing Republicans efforts to pay for their proposed extension and expansion of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act with spending cuts to entitlement programs like Medicaid. House Energy and Commerce Republicans are looking to amend provider taxes, institute frequent eligibility checks, shrink entitlement support to states that provide Medicaid to illegal immigrants, and institute work requirements for able-bodied adults without children beginning in 2029, among other reforms.
“Republicans are eviscerating our social safety net” and “cutting everything that means anything to anybody,” Representative Jim McGovern, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, tells National Review. “People are paying attention, and they’re horrified by what they’re doing.”
“The one thing about the Republicans’ reconciliation bill is that Democrats are united like never before,” says McGovern. “From the left to the right within our party, everybody understands that this is a crappy bill.”
“United like never before” is surely an exaggerated characterization of a Democratic Party that is still incredibly divided over how to resist the administration’s policies and win back the voters who voted red in November.
Months after their bruising electoral defeat, historically unpopular Democrats are split over whether they should swing at every pitch or adopt a more focused anti-Trump opposition centered around voters’ economic concerns. They don’t have a united position on immigration reform, identity politics litmus tests, the political pitfalls of DEI, and whether K-12-aged children should get access to gender-transition medical care. They are divided over whether Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should lead the party after he helped Republicans avert a government shutdown back in March. They are divided over how to respond to the administration’s deportation strategy, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) reportedly discouraging his members from traveling to El Salvador to defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia (though his office denies those reports.)
And Democrats are even divided over whether they should oust controversial 25-year-old David Hogg from his Democratic National Committee vice chairmanship – not for threatening to spend millions ousting “asleep at the wheel” lawmakers in safe blue seats, but over gender-equality concerns in the committee’s leadership ranks.
What’s more, some of the political momentum they developed earlier this year fighting the Department of Government Efficiency’s slash-and-burn approach to the federal bureaucracy has been memory-holed now that DOGE czar Elon Musk has taken a step back from the White House.
Against this backdrop is the profound lack of trust millions of Americans have in the Democratic Party surrounding former President Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline while in office.
“Did you really not have any idea that he was not fit to serve a second term?” CNN host Kasie Hunt asked Schumer in a recent interview.
“Kasie, we’re looking forward,” Schumer dodged in response.
Questions about Biden’s fitness for office will only grow louder in the coming weeks amid publication of a series of new books like Original Sin, which allege that the former president struggled to recognize George Clooney and some his own longtime aides, raised concerns among his staff about the need for a wheelchair during a prospective second term, and had lost the confidence of many of his own cabinet members.
Democrats are preparing for the worst ahead of the Trump administration’s expected release of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur – who declined to bring charges against the former president for mishandling of classified documents while concluding that he was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
And yet they’re also trying to find the silver lining wherever they can, including over entitlement reform and tax-cut provisions in this year’s reconciliation bill.
Republicans characterize their 2025 legislative agenda as a tax-cut bill that will promote growth, bolster defense spending, unleash American energy, and secure the U.S.-Mexico border. But they’re also divided over many of the House-drafted bill’s provisions, particularly those involving Medicaid, the state and local (SALT) deduction, and clean-energy tax credit phase-outs.
Democrats are wasting no time caricaturing the draft GOP legislation in terms that will they hope will reverse millions of Americans’ perception of their party as being out of touch with the working class.
“I have not had a chance to review all of it,” Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.) said of the House-GOP drafted reconciliation bill, “but what I’m hearing from people in the state constantly is that cutting main Medicaid would be disastrous for many people to our hospitals or rural communities. And for that to pay for tax cuts for wealthy is not acceptable.”
Added Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.) in a brief interview on Wednesday: “I can’t imagine why anybody would try to slash medica Medicaid to pay for incredibly unnecessary tax cuts to the hyper-wealthy.”