Sarah Longwell, Publisher, The Bulwark:
It’s actually very simple. Donald Trump demanded it, and they all fell in line.
And it is actually a little bit stunning, because they were such firm no’s when it came to the Senate version of this bill. And for some of the fiscal hawks, they were no’s because it added somewhere between $4.1 trillion and $6 trillion to the debt. And then for the moderates, for some of those legislators, there was a real concern about the cuts to Medicaid.
And so a lot of those legislators had said, absolutely not, we will not vote for this bill. And then Trump and J.D. Vance simply went to work on them, calling them and cajoling them and browbeating them. And there was a lot of peer pressure.
And I think it’s really become one of the pieces of orthodoxy now and the Republican Party even transcends the commitment to tax cuts is the commitment to doing whatever Donald Trump says you have got to do.
