The Senate OBBBA Dissenters

Two out of three moderates and one extremist. Guess who feels most free to vote their conscience?

Well, the Republican-controlled Senate managed to pass their awful One Big Beautiful Bill Act. They lost three votes: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Susan Collins of Maine. But Majority Leader John Thune was able to hold on to the one remaining vote that they needed for the bill to pass: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The dynamics of that quartet are illustrative of the state of the GOP today.

Tillis’s primary objections to the bill aren’t particularly different from those voiced by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri or any number of other Republicans who have postured as defenders of working-class and other “real” Americans, the ones who claim to be trying to make Ross Douthat’s and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party a reality. The deep cuts to Medicaid will hit many Republican voters directly, and will be especially devastating in rural areas where many hospitals may have to close. Tillis made it clear that he was willing to be convinced that the bill wouldn’t be that bad, that it really would make Medicaid more efficient by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse, but he wanted the time and attention to actually be convinced, and neither the leadership nor the White House was willing to give it. But Hawley wants a political future, which requires toeing the line. Tillis was prepared to throw in the towel, and go out with a speech about how this bill betrays the promises of Trump’s own campaign and how Washington just isn’t the place it used to be, which is what he did.

Collins is the only remaining Republican Senator representing a state that voted Democratic in the last presidential election. It’s not clear how long Maine will remain Democratic; along with New Hampshire, it keeps threatening to become a swing state without ever quite tipping over. But as long as it does, Collins is vulnerable, and therefore gets cut a certain amount of slack, because she is valuable. I don’t believe, though, that this is one of those votes that was truly optional. Collins, like Murkowski, is a moderate with a long history of delivering for her state and an often conflicted relationship with the national party’s priorities, but at the end of the day she delivers votes when needed and dissents when a controversial bill is going to pass anyway or fail anyway. How Collins wound up among those voting no and Murkowski among those voting yea I don’t presume to know. Collins is up for reelection in 2026 and Murkowski is not, so maybe that gave her a trump card. Were she to thumb her nose at the president, Murkowski is also more vulnerable to a challenge from the MAGA right than Collins is, so maybe that’s why the Alaskan played ball and the Mainer stayed on the bench. Or maybe they played rock-paper-scissors and Collins won.

Murkowski, to get to yes, demanded a series of concessions that basically exempted her state from much of the harm the bill might do. And she has been vocal about how, notwithstanding those concessions, the bill is still a bad one overall. President Bill Clinton, when he signed the Republican welfare reform bill in 1996, described it as “good bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” Murkowski has been considerably less-effusive than that in her praise for the bill she voted for. How that will help with her eventual reelection campaign I don’t know, but presumably the Republican leadership doesn’t care what she says so long as she says “yea.”

So we’ve got three relatively moderate GOP senators, two of whom voted no and one of whom voted yes while whining that she really wanted to vote no. But Rand Paul isn’t a moderate. He’s an independent-minded libertarian firebrand upset that the bill will add massively to the national debt—and therefore necessitates a multi-trillion-dollar increase in the debt limit. This is what Paul objected to. Not the extension of the tax cuts that are the cause of the additional debt, nor the Medicaid cuts that partly offset it, but the fact that the bill didn’t force further spending cuts to bring the budget into balance.

This is also Elon Musk’s objection to the bill. It’s also Representative Thomas Massie’s objection to the bill—the Tea Party-backed Kentuckian whom President Trump has promised to defeat by backing a primary challenger. I don’t know what to say about these people, because the reality is that if you want to bring the budget into balance while also extending the massive tax cuts of Trump’s first term, you either need massive new taxes elsewhere—presumably on consumption, since income and wealth are off-limits—or you have to cut not just Medicaid but Medicare and Social Security. The fact that Musk was unable to find any material amount of fraud in Social Security seems to have made no dent in either his or Paul’s worldview; the problem is still unspecified “wasteful spending” rather than anything with an actual and meaningful number attached.

But these people are the only members of the GOP who can actually kill a fiscally unconscionable bill like this. Moderates who know better can only dissent if they are ready to retire or if they aren’t needed to deliver victory. But the extremists who believe in magic math can vote their consciences though the heavens fall. And any hope for still killing this bill depends primarily on them.