One Big Beautiful Bill.

Squaring the Circle.

The following piece was written by Jerry Seib. Mr. Seib worked for The Wall Street Journal for 45 years; 29 of them as the Journal’s executive Washington editor and Capital Journal columnist. He is now a visiting fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.

Gerry’s piece first appeared at Political News Items. It is his second column for the Political Items newsletter. You can read the first one by clicking on this link.

The link below is for a subscription to Political Items, a “sister” newsletter to News Items.

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As they struggle to pass “One Big Beautiful Bill” encompassing all their budget and tax hopes, Republicans are colliding head-on with the paradox of modern politics: the bigger and more successful your party becomes, the harder it is to satisfy everybody within it.

The Republicans’ big tent has long included both tax-cutters and deficit hawks, and there’s always been tension between them. Now, in the era of President Donald Trump, the party also has a growing band of working-class voters heavily dependent on government funds and programs.

So how do you cut taxes, reduce the deficit and still satisfy those Trump foot soldiers who rely on federal largess, whether they like to admit it or not? It’s almost impossible to do all three things at once.

Republicans’ big tax and budget bill passed the House by just a single vote late last month, and only after pitched arguments. Elon Musk, the presidential pal who has fallen out of favor, called the measure a disgusting abomination” and said the Senate should kill it because it will add trillions of dollars to the national debt. Tax cutters, though, actually would have preferred making some business tax cuts permanent, which would have added to the bill’s cost. Meanwhile, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley says it will be not only “suicidal” for Republicans to cut Medicaid, but a sign that the party is suffering from an “identity crisis.”

As it happens, this struggle is playing out most obviously over healthcare. The budget framework would cut about $900 billion in Medicaid and some other health programs over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Some 10.9 million people would lose coverage—a change that strikes directly at some of the working-class voters that Republicans have worked so hard to win over in recent years.

One illustration: Of the seven states most dependent on Medicaid funding, four of them—Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia—voted for President Trump, according to an analysis from KFF, a healthcare-policy research organization formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“As non-college whites have moved from the Democratic to the Republican party, a great many of them are at least partially dependent on government programs like Medicaid and Social Security,” says Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster and consultant. “The dynamics of cutting a program like Medicaid are completely different from what they would have been 10 years ago. There are a great many rural hospitals in areas that voted heavily for Donald Trump that are heavily dependent on Medicaid dollars. Some may go bankrupt.”

The president, who seems to understand his own coalition, had pledged not to allow Medicaid to be cut. But Republicans have found that it simply isn’t possible to do that while also meeting his other imperative to cut taxes. Many in the party insist that the reductions they are trying to achieve in health spending come from badly needed reforms, such as imposing work requirements on some adults who receive Medicaid benefits. Still, saving big money on Medicaid can happen only by significantly cutting the number of people receiving benefits. Republicans have generally steered clear of Medicare, which is even more politically sensitive.

Healthcare, however, isn’t the only place where the new and bigger Trump coalition likes government spending. Rural states, which are a solid Trump constituency, are heavily dependent on federal agriculture programs. Southern states, which also went heavily for Trump, are big recipients of military spending.

As a result, calling for deeper spending cuts across the board, which for decades has been the standard Republican formula when facing budget deficits, simply isn’t the obvious answer any longer.

To see why, one need only look at how the party’s base has changed as Republicans have steadily attracted more lower-income and working-class voters. Aggregated Wall Street Journal and NBC News polling data compiled by the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies shows that, in 2016, 39% of voters with a high school education or less identified as Republicans; last year, that share had risen to 50%. Among white working-class voters overall, those identifying as Republican rose from 43% to 51%. The share of those from rural counties identifying as Republican rose from 49% to 59% over the same period.

This version of the GOP is simply more reliant on federal dollars than your grandfather’s version was, as can be seen by looking at which states benefit most from Washington spending. The Rockefeller Institute of Government annually calculates each state’s “balance of payments” with the federal government, comparing how much its citizens and businesses send to Washington in taxes with the amount the state gets back through benefits, contracts and other spending.

The institute’s latest rankings show that 13 of the 15 states with the biggest positive balance of payments—that is, the ones that received the most dollars from the federal government compared with the amount they sent in—voted for Trump last year. By contrast, nine of the 11 states that got back less in federal payments than they sent to Washington voted Democratic in the last presidential election.

The new face of the Republican party is reflected in the pending budget and tax bill. It includes provisions aimed specifically at working-class voters, such as exempting tips and overtime pay from taxation, a reduction on taxes paid on Social Security benefits by senior citizens and an expansion of the child tax credit. Such steps please many in the party but also aggravate those unhappy that the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

“It’s hard to be both a deficit-hawk party and a strict defender of the current benefit structure,” says Brendan Buck, who was a top aide to former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan. “So you end up with a bill like this that doesn’t really excite anyone.”

In short, Republicans face a new coalition-management challenge. For much of the last century, Democrats were the ones who had to figure out how to satisfy people in their big tent who had markedly different backgrounds and priorities. Franklin Roosevelt built an enduring Democratic coalition that somehow included Blacks in the North and segregationists in the South, factory workers and farmers, intellectuals and high-school dropouts.

The Democrats succeeded in holding this coalition together in large measure by convincing each constituency to focus not on their differences but rather on their mistrust of the Republicans, argues former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He advises Republicans to pursue a similar strategy now by trying to persuade the disparate elements of their coalition that the one thing they share is antipathy toward Democrats. “The number one rule is focus on your opponents,” Gingrich says.

Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, an organization dedicated to constructing an economic framework for the new and more populist GOP, says internal tensions are the inevitable result of the party’s “ongoing transformation.” For now, he says, he would tweak the existing budget plan by letting the existing tax cut for the top earners expire, which would generate more revenue, and then add in revenues from the Trump tariffs. “That would make it fiscally responsible, entirely consistent with the president's stated priorities, politically viable in asking not only benefit recipients but also high earners to share in deficit reduction, and aligned with the core interests of the emerging Republican coalition,” he says.

If recent history is any guide, though, the more likely outcome may well be to buy peace by giving everybody some of what they want, running up the deficit further and letting somebody else worry about it later. “Those who are complaining about [the debt and deficit] usually end up taking one for the team, especially when something is the president’s top priority,” says Ron Bonjean, a former senior Republican staff member in the House.