May 21st, 2025.

Just after 1 o'clock this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named the one big, beautiful bill.

If passed, this measure will put Trump's wish list into law.

Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant

restriction on the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they

violate court orders,

as Dean of Berkeley Law School Irwin Shemarinsky explained in Just Security Monday.

Without the contempt power, he writes, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.

Three judges are currently considering whether the administration is in contempt of

court over its apparent disregard for court orders over its rendition of undocumented immigrants to

third countries. But the center of the bill is indeed related to money. It is the $3.8 trillion

extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately

benefit the wealthy in corporations. Yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said

that Americans in the lowest 10th of earners will lose money under the measure, while people in the top 5% of earners

will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.

Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal health care and food

assistance programs to partially offset the

costs of the tax cuts. Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without

health care coverage. Cuts of about 30 percent to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

would be the biggest cut in the program's history.

Ty Jones Cox, Vice President for Food Assistance Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy priorities, told Lori Conish of CNBC.

They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034.

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