To discuss the political fallout of the Republican budget bill and the state of American democracy on this Independence Day,

we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That's New York Times columnist, David Brooks, and Jonathan Kepard, associate editor of the Washington Post.

Gentlemen, welcome. Happy fourth. Jonathan, there were more than a couple times this week.

It looked like the big, beautiful bill wasn't going to make it.

Like it was sort of a teetering on the brink of failure.

But a lot of the people who said there was no way they could support what came over from the Senate switched after talking to the president.

What does this say about the president's hold and influence on the Republican

Party now? Well, we've always known that his hold on the Republican Party is firm. What this vote,

and now it's law, so now what this law says to me is he now has complete and total control

of Washington.

Congress, a co-equal, separate branch of government basically is the staffing arm of the executive.

And the judicial branch, especially the Supreme Court, it seems like with some of their decisions,

they are doing things in favor of a lot of some

of the extreme things we've seen come out of the administration.

So what we see with this so-called one big beautiful bill act, which is now the law, that

they, you know, forced to get passed by this arbitrary deadline of July 4th so the president could

sign it on the South Lawn, as he just did moments ago. This just says that President Trump,

what happened is what we've been seeing happen since January 20th. He says jump, they say how

high, and then they do it for him. David, total control of Washington? Yeah, I mean, it's true. The presidents usually get their big signature initiative. But a couple of things are interesting to me. First, he's on a bit of a role. He had the Iran bombing, which did not lead to a wider war. He won some Supreme Court victories. Immigration across the southern borders at decades-long lows.

So the White House is crowing on all these victories, and they pass this thing. And so that suggests

some momentum and some control. Of course, the shocking thing, when he's taken a step back, is that

this did, used to be a party that didn't like deficits. And this is adding $3 trillion of deficits.

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