What Are Republicans Thinking With Such a Reckless Bill? Maybe This.

After a great deal of arm-twisting, the Republican Senate has passed its version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates, the legislation’s permanent tax cuts combined with spending increases on defense and border security and large cuts to Medicaid and other social spending would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, with more red ink in the years and decades after.

A bill that busts the budget might be the right medicine for an under-stimulated economy. But fiscal and economic conditions are radically different from those during President Trump’s first term. Inflation remains a concern, and interest rates are significantly higher than they were in the 2010s or during the pandemic. Already, the annual cost of interest on the debt has soared to levels not seen since the 1990s, and adding trillions more to the debt will only compound an already serious problem.

The bill is strikingly unpopular among voters. Even some Republican lawmakers who voted for the bill have expressed varying degrees of ambivalence or outright hostility.

So why are they behaving in a way that appears to be both politically self-destructive and potentially ruinous for the country?

The answer may be that Republicans aren’t focused on solving a fiscal problem. They’re focused on solving a political problem, one that extends beyond the midterm elections. In doing so, they may be borrowing a page from the playbook of the Reagan-era G.O.P.

America’s fiscal mess is a bipartisan creation. It was during the George W. Bush years that federal tax receipts became consistently insufficient to support the level of spending. But it was during the Joe Biden years that the cost of interest payments on the national debt soared — yet the administration continued to pursue new spending initiatives, even as the economy boomed and inflation took off.