The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Thu, 22 May 2025
Republicans moved at such lightning speed that even they don't know how many people would lose health insurance— or how much they'd be spiking the deficit with their highly risky and big, ugly turd of a bill. And they don't care because they're cosmically committed to stopping the government from making rich people pay for healthcare for people who aren't. Plus, Dem leaders have an age culture problem, environmental groups are stuck in a Ralph Nader time-warp, and the danger of radical politics and supporting Hamas hits home on the streets of DC. Jonathan Chait joins join Tim Miller. show notes Jon's new piece on the House GOP bill (gift) Jonathan Cohn on the proposed Medicaid work requirements Tim and Patrick Gaspard on Trump's lies about South Africa Jon's piece on John Fetterman (gift) Jon on Trump's immoral foreign policy (gift) Douthat interviewing JD Vance *Join Tim, Sarah and Crooked's Jon Lovett for a FREE ANDRY live show and fundraiser June 6
Chapter 1: What is the House GOP's 'Big Beautiful Bill'?
You know, the Republicans are, you know, on the right, there's been a lot of commentators. And on Fox, like coming to Fetterman's defense.
be like his mental acuity is fine and the left is just coming for him because he took a pro Israel position and I don't know how that squares with the bulwark coming for him but whatever because you guys hate Israel so much yeah so anyway I don't know what if you have any additional thoughts on the Fetterman saga
I mean, I wrote a piece about it. You can read it in The Atlantic. And I tried to just go through this argument step by step. So I'm not going to recapitulate the whole thing. But number one, the position the Republicans are taking on this makes absolutely no sense. The main person who's testified about Fetterman's mental state is his chief staff, right? It's Adam Jentleson, a friend of mine.
Adam Jentleson has complained about the woke staffers. When the woke staffers were attacking Fetterman's Israel position, he was slapping them down and saying he got elected, you didn't get elected. So the idea that Adam Jentleson is complaining about Fetterman's health because Adam Jentleson is upset about Fetterman's Israel position is implausible.
And what I wanted to point out in this piece is that the Republicans are literally doing the exact same thing that the Biden dead-enders were doing, which is just disregarding extensive evidence that this public servant has lost cognitive ability because it's inconvenient for their position to make that admission.
And it's just remarkable that when they knew they were coming into this big public debate about Biden's fitness, they had a test case to show that actually we're better than you, Hacks. We're willing to admit it when a guy we like is sick. And they all flunked the test.
100% of them flunked the test because they get some marginal value out of Fetterman, you know, casting a vote for Pam Bondi and saying a nice thing about Trump and being pro-Netanyahu.
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Chapter 2: What are the economic risks of the new health care bill?
and that's a problem and there's they have a homelessness crisis and that's a problem and california should try to fix it like that's like really all he's saying i mean you could kind of some abundance has a lot of detailed policy walk nerd stuff but his overarching point you could summarize in a tweet and a very obvious one and it's pretty i guess it's kind of alarming to me that it's even controversial people don't like being told that they're the problem
No one likes that. And what abundance does is it points at the progressive movement and says, we are the problem. The things we did in the 1970s are causing us to fail today. We have to change our mentality. And a lot of people are still invested in those ideas. And one of the points I try to make in this piece that I'm writing, that obviously you haven't seen, hasn't come out yet.
We're just teasing people now.
Pretty much all of our listeners are already Atlantic subscribers because this is the official home of The Atlantic, the official podcast home of The Atlantic, so I'm sure they'll be able to read it. It's true. If there are any who are not, go subscribe to The Atlantic. Eventually, Jeff Goldberg will give me a 10% vig on all those subs, but it hasn't happened yet.
I'm sure it will. People talk about the groups, right? That's part of the discourse within the left is the role of the progressive groups in creating this infrastructure where every group has its position that it holds to and it gets all the other groups to hold to it. And that's what's pushed the party to the left over the last 10 years. Ralph Nader pretty much invented that.
He invented the groups. He invented all these groups that came in to DC to lobby for their individual position. The whole idea that we're, he called them like a new class of citizen that we're inventing this, this professional activist group. So like, this is a gigantic part of the progressive movement infrastructure that has a stake in the,
in this set of laws that the abundance movement is trying to change. So it's not a small thing that they're trying to revise. It's really the entire orientation of the progressive movement.
Somebody who's been making these cases for 30 years, the neoliberal shill who has, you have college aged kids, not college, right? We're in college.
I do.
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