Editor’s Note: Dear Readers — All four Iowa members of Congress voted for this bill (joining all but three Republicans in the House), so as you read about Iowa’s Congressional Delegation, please remember your own Republican delegation.
Even the name of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” as the reconciliation bill passed by the US. House on Thursday is called, is a lie.
But all four Iowans in the U.S. House voted for it.
That is the formal name of the budget reconciliation bill House Republicans coughed up late last week. All four Iowans repeatedly said they would support and protect many of the items slashed in the bill, but they voted to cut them deeply Thursday.
All four voted to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and a host of other programs without consulting their constituents or asking them to weigh in. They also supported a process that deliberately rushed the legislation through the House without any opportunity for public review and discussion.
Despite each having several staffers whose full-time job is specifically to help the members of Congress communicate with their Iowa constituents, none of the four Iowans in Congress explained to their constituents what the legislation actually does before they voted for it.
The bill literally was passed in the dark of night, a strategy deliberately designed to keep Americans from knowing what was in it and weighing in on it before it could be passed.
The process, the vote and the bill deserve to live in infamy.
Each Iowa House member should have to spend the rest of their careers explaining and defending the bill, their vote for it, and the “dark of night” process used to rush it through the House.
Remember their names: Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-1st IA); Reps. Ashley Hinson (R-2nd-IA); Zach Nunn (R-3rd Iowa ); and Randy Feenstra (R-4th IA).
Read on to learn …
– What their campaign speeches would have sounded like in 2024 if they had told the truth when they last asked Iowans to vote for them
None campaigned on their support for the mayhem and destruction this bill will cause in the lives of Iowans and other Americans. Most either suggested that such cuts could be avoided or were not needed, and none said they would support such policies.
But they did. Every one of the four Iowans voted for this mess.
The formal name for the bill, seriously, is “The Big Beautiful Bill.” That name is a lie. It should have been called “The Big Stinking Mess Bill!” There is nothing “beautiful” about a bill that will:
- Add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the ultimate authority for Congress on what the financial impact will be on proposed or pending legislation; The national debt, which the four Iowans constantly harp about when Democrats control either the Congress or the White House, now stands at nearly $36 trillion.
All four Iowas voted to add $2.4 trillion to that debt without a peep.
- Slash $1 trillion from safety net programs over ten years that help feed hungry kids and others who lack access to basic food supplies, again, according to the nonpartisan CBO;
- Force $500 BILLION in cuts to Medicare over ten years; Miller-Meeks, Hinson, Nunn, and Feenstra voted for the largest cut to Medicare in history when they voted “aye” on this legislation.
- Strip Medicaid coverage from 8.7 million poor and old people who need medical care over the next decade; Nearly 80 million Americans are covered by Medicaid, with 860,000 of them Iowans.
Miller-Meeks, Hinson, Nunn, and Feenstra voted for the largest cut to Medicaid in history when they voted for this bill.
NOTE: Rural hospitals, like Iowa’s 83 critical access hospitals, 214 rural health care clinics, 59 federally qualified health centers, 402 skilled nursing homes all disproportionately depend on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for the care they deliver. They are already financially stressed and would be hard hit by cuts made by the legislation for which Miller-Meeks, Hinson, Nunn and Feenstra voted.
- The CBO also estimates that an additional 7.6 million more Americans would lose their health insurance because of this legislation over the next 10 years. If you turn out to be one of them, be sure to thank Miller-Meeks, Hinson, Nunn, and Feenstra. The bill passed by a margin of 1 vote, so literally you couldn’t have done it – lost your health insurance – without them.
- Cuts $267 billion over 10 years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which used to be called the Food Stamp Program. It provides financial help to poor people and families to buy food, something you might think people who claim to be people of faith and “pro-life” would support.
FARMERS BEWARE: As a major food growing state, Iowa gets hit by this, too. The people who are helped by this program are customers of Iowa farmers and other food producing states. The Food Stamp Program, now known as SNAP, was created to help feed starving Americans, many of them kids, but it was also created to expand domestic farm product markets for American farmers.
Miller-Meeks, Hinson, Nunn and Feenstra just voted to shrink domestic farm product markets by $267 billion over 10 years. It’s hard to see how that helps Iowa farmers, especially as Trump continues – with his tariffs – to disrupt and destroy farm export markets.
If they were honest, the “quad” should have given last election: Click to read the “Speech” (and scroll down)
A “Big Beautiful Bill?” Definitely a case that depends on the “eye of the beholder.”
Calling a bill which does all this – and much more just as hideous – is like calling the August 24, 79 CE eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Italy that wiped out and buried the city of Pompeii a “Big Beautiful Volcanic Ash Dust Up.”