Archbishop Wester: the Big Beautiful Bill a "Moral Failure"

Earlier today, Senate Republicans passed a version of the GOP's massive budget-reconciliation legislation, dubbed The Big Beautiful Bill in homage to President Trump.  

The bill represents Trump's signature legislative achievement for this term in office.  It adds or subtracts funding for many areas of public life: taxation, border policy and immigration, military spending, Medicaid, food assistance, clean energy programs, the debt ceiling, and more.

The House had passed its own version of the bill on May 22nd.  The two chambers will now need to cooperate to come up with a reconciled piece of legislation for President Trump to sign.  It's quite possible that Republicans won't meet the July 4th artificial deadline imposed by their leadership, but in my view it is a virtual certainty that they will meet somewhere in the middle, and President Trump will sign whatever they come up with.

In America Magazine, in an article written before today's passage of the Senate version, and the all-night session that preceded it, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, NM characterizes the legislation as a "moral failure".  The article's headline: "Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ betrays the poor. The church must oppose it."

Here is some of Wester's analysis:

...the legislation is anything but beautiful, at least from the perspective of Catholic teaching. It basically steals from the poor to give to the rich, and it will leave millions of low-income U.S. citizens struggling to survive. It also funds a mass deportation campaign that will separate immigrant families and profoundly harm children, including U.S.-citizen children...

It is estimated that the legislation would cut $700 billion over 10 years in Medicaid spending, leaving 7.6 million American families without health-care coverage. It also reduces spending for food assistance to the nation’s poorest by an estimated $300 billion over 10 years, adversely impacting 40 million low-income persons, including 16 million children. As many as 5.4 million per year could lose food assistance from the cuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill transfers wealth from citizens with the lowest tenth of income to those with the highest tenth of income, the largest transfer in U.S. history.

On immigration, it appropriates $75 billion for a mass deportation campaign, which includes funding for detention centers and a substantial increase in border and interior enforcement personnel. It allows these agents to remove people based on the suspicionof illegal activity, without judicial review. And it increases fees for such benefits as temporary protected status (T.P.S.), humanitarian parole and work permits for asylum applicants, leaving these important protection mechanisms out of the reach of qualifying families.

To make matters worse, the bill undermines other important church teachings, such as the need for a progressive tax structure based on the ability to pay and measures to combat climate change, as it raises taxes on the working poor and repeals clean energy tax credits.

Wester then addresses what the church's role should be regarding the legislative process for this bill:

There is another factor for the church to consider in this debate, as well—its moral authority. Unless the church stands up for the poor and marginalized of the nation, consistent with Catholic teaching, its moral voice will be diminished in the future. There are times when the church needs to forsake political considerations and take a stand, even if that effort is unsuccessful. This is one of those times.

There is time to defeat this legislation, or at least to change it substantially, as the U.S. Senate has yet to consider it. But this will not happen unless the church states unequivocally its opposition to the House bill and any similar Senate version. An approach which opposes parts of the legislation but indicates support for other provisions—as was done when the bill was before the House—gives legislators the cover to vote for the bill. There are other ways to support the few parts of the bill worthy of it. They should not be achieved on the backs of the poorest of society.

Wester has an ability to speak in a prophetic voice that I lack. I'm more likely to adopt the approach he criticizes, saying provision A is good but provisions X, Y and Z are bad. In addition, I'm less comfortable predicting the future impact of new legislation than he apparently is.

The provision in the bill that worries me the most is the mountain of money ($45 billion, I believe I heard on PBS yesterday) appropriated to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.  In my view, privatizing the detainment of arrested immigrants is a bad and dangerous idea; and the US's implementation of it surely is resulting in the violation of human rights, perhaps on a large scale.  Now these programs will have the funding to mulitiply.  Entrepreneurial government contractors are poised to make a fortune by finding a new way to make immigrants "disappear" into unaccountable private facilities.  This is not the America I signed up for.