Juan Ciscomani says: “When You’re Losing the Game, Change the Name of the Game!”

The Hated One Big Beautiful Bill Has a NEW NAME. It’s still oppressive and unpopular though.

(Sign by the Unseat Ciscomani MAGA-Shave Team)

            Congressman Juan Ciscomani, who avoids unscripted encounters with almost all of his constituents at all costs, showed up last Friday before a Republican club in Green Valley. As to be expected, he took advantage of being in that GOP bubble to assure his fellow party members that things were going well in Iran and spoke at some length about his accomplishments in the House of Representatives.

            But he also took up the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Donald Trump likes extravagant statements such as that one, so Republican leaders were happy not to disappoint him on the title. The bill, was deemed “Beautiful” because it contained things Trump and congressional Republicans like most—tax breaks for the wealthy, and tons of money for immigration deportation, It was rammed through Congress with only Republican votes last year. In fact, it only passed by one vote in the House on May 22, so Ciscomani’s “yes” vote was theoretically the one pushing it over the top. This makes him responsible for the disastrous effects of the law (see below).

At the individual and family level, the bill provided some tax breaks. Ciscomani regaled the 100 or so in the crowd with: “This was a bill for the working class for the people that are working.” He harped on the provision in the bill that exempts restaurant worker tips from taxation and made a weird comparison: “How many billionaires do you know that are people that can save their money and actually make more and keep more of their money?”

            Ciscomani, in the Republican Club bubble, also deftly changed the name of the bill, per advice of Republican media consultants. He now calls it the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. That’s a fairy-tale, make-believe title. The legislation explicitly calls it the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as the president wanted.

            But though it was officially called “Beautiful,” the act turned out to be pretty hideous to a majority of Americans. A national polling firm reported Monday that Americans in what are seen to be the most contested states in the November election give thumbs down to the OBBB Act by 11 percent. (Arizona is one of those “Battleground” states, by the way, and if that’s so, Ciscomani’s always-closely-contested Sixth District must be Gettysburg).

            That majority of people who disapprove of the bill likely know some or all of the following:

• The law contains tax policies that greatly benefit the upper 10 percent of income earners with business tax cuts, international business and investment income breaks, and a reduction in the tax rate on the highest incomes. These are all estimated to cost the US $2.3 trillion over the next 10 years.
• New tax cuts are unfairly distributed, greatly benefiting high-income earners. According to the Budge Lab at Yale University, only about a seventh of the lowest 20 percent of earners could have expected a personal tax cut last year, and only about half of the next 20 percent could, either.
• To accommodate those big tax cuts outlined above, the OBBB mandated immediate cuts to food programs for the needy, that has thrown 400,000 Arizonans, almost half of them children, off this aid.
• Cuts to health care insurance subsidies not only threaten to make the affected folks sicker, but they also endanger the financial health of small, rural hospitals, including those in Ciscomani’s district. Yet he voted for the bill anyway, after vowing he, as a congressman, would protect those subsidies.

Back to Ciscomani’s strange analogy of lower-income tip earners to billionaires. He thinks it odd that the big-bucks folks “can save their money and actually make more and keep more of their money?” Billionaires ought to be doing just swell under the new provisions of the “Beautiful Bill.” It was written for them.

Pretending that legislation crafted to help the rich at the expense of the truly needy is a “Working Families” boost is likely to be called, in current parlance, “gaslighting.” That term had its birth in a Broadway play and film around 1940. We prefer to say Juan Ciscomani is indulging in something far older, with ancient roots in the Greek language. The word is “hypocrisy,” which originally meant “acting on a stage”. In Green Valley last week, for example.