MAGA Rep Makes Wild Claim About Why It’s OK People Will Lose Medicaid

Florida Representative Randy Fine took a moment to remind people that the most important reason to pass the “big, beautiful bill” is to give Donald Trump exactly what he wants.

During a Fox News interview in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the Florida Republican tried to recenter amid lengthy deliberations over the president’s behemoth budget bill that was returned to the House.

“But what we have to understand that the American people are counting on us, and people are losing sight of what this bill does,” Fine said, before proceeding to not explain what the bill does at all.

“Imagine you’re a waitress working right now who’s depending on tips to pay your bills, or you’re an older person whose dependent on Social Security and you don’t want to pay taxes on what you earned for your whole life, or you’re one of the people who’s gonna lose all of the tax breaks they’ve had all of this time, we need to give certainty to the American people,” Fine said.

“But the most important thing is we’ve all committed to support President Trump. He is counting on us to deliver on his signature legislative achievement, and we just have to get the job done.” Fine said.

The most important thing is being transparent with the American public. The benefits of Trump’s No Tax on Tips provision are easily outweighed by massive cuts to essential programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. Although Trump has claimed there will be no taxes on Social Security for seniors, that provision isn’t actually in his massive spending and tax bill.

Instead, seniors who are not on Social Security will get a short-term standard deduction boost, but those who do receive Social Security payments will get absolutely nothing. And the tax breaks that would be extended from Trump’s 2017 tax plan are skewed to benefit corporations and the very rich.

President Trump has no idea what’s actually in his sweeping, term-defining budget bill. NOTUS reported on Wednesday that House Republicans had to tell the president that his “big, beautiful bill” was indeed slashing Medicaid.

Trump had a sit-down with the more moderate House Republicans on Wednesday in which he told them that the three things they needed to let be if they wanted to win in 2026 and 2028: Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member told the president, according to NOTUS sources.

Trump has never been the wonkiest guy, but the fact that he was seemingly unaware that his “big, beautiful bill” is attacking Medicaid is alarming. Either he’s just completely settled into being a vessel for the Heritage Foundation while their guys spoon-feed him legislation, or his mental acuity needs to be questioned. Or both.

Trump’s budget bill will throw millions off of Medicaid to help fund tax breaks for the richest people in the country. At least 17 million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance by 2034, thanks to changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. It’s not that Trump didn’t understand that, it’s that he didn’t seem to know that was happening at all. To him, this bill is simply a GOP loyalty test with a massive check attached.

With House Republicans poised to pass President Trump’s centerpiece legislation, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is making the most of the customary “magic minute” he’s afforded at the end of floor debate. In a marathon speech that has lasted six hours thus far, the New York Democrat is taking to task supporters of the “big, beautiful bill,” which would deliver historic rollbacks in the social safety net.

Beginning just shy of 5 a.m., and ongoing as of this writing, Jeffries began by observing, “This bill represents the largest cut to health care in American history. It’s an all-out assault on the health care of the American people,” which renders hollow Trump’s January promise to “love and cherish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.”

Later on, Jeffries addressed House Speaker Mike Johnson, saying, “I feel the obligation, Mr. Speaker, to stand on this House floor, and take my sweet time.” As his Democratic colleagues broke into applause, Jeffries continued, “to tell the stories of the American people” as well as “their health care,” “their Medicaid,” “their nutritional assistance,” “veterans,” “farmers,” “children,” “seniors,” “people with disabilities,” and “small businesses.”

Jeffries’s speech is working through a sizable collection of letters from residents of each U.S. state who are worried about losing health care coverage, or otherwise suffering under the legislation, as well as naming the Republican lawmakers who represent those concerned residents.

Shortly before 8 a.m., Jeffries said, “Budgets are moral documents. And in our view, Mr. Speaker, budgets should be designed to lift people up. This reckless Republican budget that we are debating right now … tears people down … and that is why I stand here on the floor of the House of Representatives with my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus, to stand up and push back against it with everything we have.”

The longest “magic minute” was an over eight-hour speech delivered in February 2018 by then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Jeffries, having recently completed his sixth hour of speaking, shows no sign of stopping soon—his effort echoing, to a degree, Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech in April lambasting the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

This story was last updated at 11:53 a.m.

It doesn’t appear that the president’s “big, beautiful bill” will muster enough votes in time.

Donald Trump has imposed a July 4 deadline on Congress to pass his signature legislative item, but actually meeting the due date has sent Republicans into disarray.

By late Wednesday afternoon, House Speaker Mike Johnson had already laid bare that the process would make lawmakers, and presumably their constituents, unhappy.

“All of us have to give up on our personal preferences,” Johnson told reporters. “That’s what I think people are recognizing and coming to grips with.”

The House Freedom Caucus had released a three-page memo earlier Wednesday heavily criticizing the Senate’s version of Trump’s exorbitantly expensive tax cut, flaming the Senate draft for adding pork where the House had proposed cuts. In their complaint, they advocated for more extreme slices from the federal budget.

But the hard-line fiscal conservatives aren’t the only party members opposing the bill: Moderates are worried about the high cost the legislation will have on safety-net programs, including some $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and swing-district Republicans are worried about political backlash in their Democrat-led states.

Any of these groups have the muster to keep the bill from passing: Johnson can afford to lose just three votes if he wants to push the bill to the president’s desk.

By the afternoon, some lawmakers had gone public with their complaints about the fiasco.

“We aren’t delayed because moderates whose constituents will be completely screwed are holding out,” posted Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell. “We are delayed because the most extreme members who want to hurt MORE people are holding out.”

Texas Representative Chip Roy, the policy chair of the House Freedom Caucus, told NBC News that the bill was not “totally exciting” for his conference and that he wasn’t sure if the bill would pass by the end of the week. He added that the half-trillion dollars in savings would have to come from somewhere else in the federal budget, though he wasn’t committed to ironing out the details in this package.

Congress is not supposed to be at the mercy of the president: The Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution to isolate three separate systems of government, intended to continually check one another’s power. But that has not been the case since Trump resumed office with a conservative majority in both legislative chambers as well as the nation’s highest judiciary. Instead, month after month, the federal government has seen lawmakers bend and capitulate to the president’s will, buying into his “mandate from the people” spiel, even when his policies cause direct harm to their constituents.

A federal judge sentenced a January 6 rioter to life in prison Wednesday for plotting to assassinate the federal agents who’d investigated him.  

U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan ordered 36-year-old Edward Kelley to spend the rest of his life behind bars, after Kelley was convicted on the charges of conspiracy to murder federal employees, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, and influencing a federal official by threat.

Kelley received his sentencing in front of more than a dozen of the targets on his “kill list,” which had specifically taken aim at individuals working at the FBI’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Prosecutors said that Kelley had created the list while awaiting trial in his insurrection case, and that he had attempted to recruit others to help him target the office with car bombs and drones, or attack individuals at their homes or public places. 

Kelley was previously convicted in November 2024 of multiple felonies and misdemeanors related to his participation in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, where he pushed a police officer to the ground before being one of the first rioters to break into the building. 

He was one of the more than 1,500 recipients of Donald Trump’s sweeping Inauguration Day pardon for violently opposing his loss in the 2020 presidential election. 

Not every January 6 rioter is getting the same shake. Former FBI agent and January 6 rioter Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—will now work alongside former interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin on the Department of Justice’s “weaponization” working group.