(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The looming passage of the Big Ugly Bill is not without consequence [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-30
New York Times:
Tillis Announces He Won’t Run Again as Trump Threatens Him With a Primary The day after President Trump castigated the North Carolina Republican senator Thom Tillis for opposing the bill carrying his domestic agenda, Mr. Tillis said he would not seek a third term. “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species,” Mr. Tillis said in a lengthy statement on his decision. The announcement came as the Senate was wading into a debate over the large-scale tax cut and domestic policy bill that Mr. Trump has demanded be delivered to his desk by July 4. Mr. Tillis announced his decision the day after issuing a statement saying he could not in good conscience support the measure, which he said would lead to tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for his state, costing people Medicaid coverage and critical health services.
x Something I’ve noticed over the past few days — many political junkies outside NYC seem to think that Adams has a good shot of beating Mamdani in the general election.
I don’t know a single serious NYC-based political junkie who thinks he has a chance, esp with Sliwa staying in. — Adam Carlson (@admcrlsn) June 30, 2025
Jonathan Cohn/The Bulwark:
A $1 Trillion Medicaid Cut Is THIS Close to Happening. Here’s What It’d Look Like. Republicans are about to slash a lifeline for the needy. In North Carolina, people are preparing for chaos and calamity. THE LEGISLATION THAT DONALD TRUMP is pushing and Republicans are trying to pass by July 4 seeks to cut Medicaid by nearly a trillion dollars over the next ten years, through a variety of changes that could include everything from so-called “work requirements” to complex changes in financing that could directly or indirectly lower the federal government’s contribution to the program. “Could” is a key word there, because the emerging bill that leaders in the Senate hope to approve by Monday is different from the bill House Republicans approved last month. And some House members are already saying they can’t vote for it. But Republicans have made threats to tank big bills before, before ultimately falling in line. And there’s a good reason to think they will do so again: Downsizing Medicaid is a longtime goal of many conservatives, who believe society is better off with less government and less government spending. Plus, the bill with the Medicaid cuts also has lots of tax cuts, which pretty much the entire party is desperate to pass.
x Tillis is all out of fucks. pic.twitter.com/zGscw7csGZ — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2025
Adrian Carrasquillo/The Bulwark:
Exclusive: The Next Move to Take on Trump’s Notorious Detention Centers A coalition of labor and civil rights groups are organizing to protest multiple Louisiana detention centers. Beginning Friday, the Justice Journey, led by the SEIU in conjunction with the ACLU and NAACP, will mobilize hundreds of union members from different industries and across the country to journey by bus to Louisiana. Once there, they will protest at multiple detention centers in the coming days, organizers told The Bulwark exclusively. The union members assembling will come from California, Illinois, the New York area, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Stops along the route will include El Paso, where they’ll meet with border and immigrant service organizations and local elected officials, Houston for a civil rights roundtable with faith leaders, a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and to Selma for the Emmett Till memorial in Alabama. On Tuesday, more than 500 workers and allies will join a culminating rally at Lafayette Park in New Orleans to demand an end to ICE raids terrorizing cities and communities and the release of people unjustly detained. The number could be far higher, organizers said, because local protests have received hundreds of participants on their own. The campaign is among the most aggressive yet from these groups to try and draw attention to—and gin up opposition towards—Trump’s deportation regime. And it’s not without risk. Trump officials have telegraphed that they want to crack down on those people protesting ICE operations, whether they be immigrants, U.S. citizens, or even elected officials.
x This is hysterical from a union that endorsed @andrewcuomo. It means that their enthusiasm for C was not even lukewarm.
https://t.co/iUYWFRLVmq — Sal Albanese (@SalAlbaneseNYC) June 27, 2025
Rivka Galchen/The New Yorker:
Calculating the Damage of Vaccine Skepticism It’s clear that we’re on the precipice of a surge in preventable diseases. But how bad will it get? In the United States, we’re somewhat blinkered about what vaccination means to the other ninety-six per cent of people in the world. On Wednesday, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that the U.S. intends to withhold the amount that the Biden Administration had pledged to Gavi, 1.6 billion dollars. He claimed that Gavi had “ignored the science” about vaccine safety. He had already dismissed all seventeen members of the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, before saying that his hand-picked replacements would review the U.S. childhood-immunization schedule. All this is to say that an enormous amount of energy has gone into grossly misleading “debates” about vaccine safety and effectiveness. The problem that led to Gavi’s formation, however, was not skepticism but scarcity. By the late nineties, relatively wealthier nations had childhood-vaccination rates of more than ninety per cent, and were seeing few cases of vaccine-preventable diseases. “But manufacturers in high-income countries were producing vaccines for high-income markets,” Violaine Mitchell, the recently retired director of global immunization efforts for the Gates Foundation, a founding partner and funder of Gavi, told me. “Low-income markets had really very little hope.”
The Bulwark:
The Public Is Resisting Trump. The Elites Aren’t. The president is encountering little resistance as he remakes our society. And yet polling is clear that voters aren’t with him. Things could be worse. They’d be worse if the American people were enthusiastically supporting Trump’s actions. But they’re not. That might make the inability or unwillingness of their “leaders” to resist Trump more forcefully seem inexplicable. But there is also hope that with the public resisting, these leaders might eventually stiffen their spines a bit. There’s some fresh evidence of public resistance in a new poll from Quinnipiac University. It shows 41 percent of voters approving of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 54 percent disapprove. More striking is this: On Trump’s signature issue of immigration and deportation—central in so many ways to his authoritarian project—64 percent of voters say they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status, while only 31 percent say they prefer deporting most of them. In December 2024, those numbers were 55 percent versus 36 percent. So Trump has lost ground on his most high-profile initiative. What’s more, 56 percent of respondents in the Quinnipiac poll disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job, 55 percent disapprove of sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles, and 60 percent disapprove of sending in the Marines. Again, cause for optimism but also befuddlement, too. After all: Couldn’t Democrats in Congress do more to point out that the “One Big Beautiful Bill” now before the Senate massively increases spending for the unpopular masked men of ICE and their deportation efforts?
x Yes I can see why people like RFK Jr are sceptical about vaccines and asking questions
I mean it's really hard to tell if they work or not
A real head scratcher pic.twitter.com/b8Ta4vn3Lt — Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) June 28, 2025
Ishaan Tharoor/Washington Post:
Mamdani may join a global trend of mayors standing up to nationalists A clash between Mamdani and Trump would be a sharp example of a worldwide trend, as mayors of major global cities find themselves at odds with nationalist governments. If successful in November, Mamdani could end up locking horns with the Trump administration over a range of issues, from its repression of pro-Palestinian activists to its mass deportation raids that are sweeping up numerous undocumented migrants living in cities. Already, Trump and other right-wing politicians in the United States are casting Mamdani’s candidacy in extreme terms, with some suggesting his triumph will be tantamount to an Islamist capture of Gotham or a communist takeover Any upcoming clash between the young, cosmopolitan Mamdani and nativist Trump would be a sharp example of a wider global trend. In an age of rising nationalism, many mayors of major cities around the world find themselves at odds with their national governments. London’s Sadiq Khan, who first won election in 2016 in the face of smears linking him to Islamist extremism, routinely feuded with Conservative prime ministers. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, a center-left politico, has been in office for over a decade, and used her platform to advocate climate action and push back against right-wing populism. Though Italy is under the sway of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s emboldened right-wing government, social democrats remain firmly in control of city governments in Milan and Rome.
x “The uncertainties will continue”
One week after bombing of Iran
https://t.co/3bAUgjXqQn — Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) June 29, 2025
David Shuster on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s meltdown:
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/30/2330843/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-The-looming-passage-of-the-Big-Ugly-Bill-is-not-without-consequence?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
