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House Republicans last month passed Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” — a legislative behemoth that will have a major impact on tens of millions of Americans (and prematurely kill some of them… which, according to Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-IA), is ok because we all must die). Now the Senate begins its work on the legislation in the hopes of getting it ready for the president’s signature in July.

Republicans are so proud of their work that they mostly conducted it in the dead of night and, if they talk about it to anybody other than their most loyal supporters, they lie about what it does and doesn’t do.

Of course, they may not know themselves.

The bill is so long that most of them probably didn’t read it before they passed it (some admittedly so). This practice of lawmakers voting on massive spending bills they could not possibly have read, by the way, is a frequent (and perfectly legitimate) complaint that conservatives usually raise before Congress passes them.

However, if the goal is to redistribute wealth to the richest Americans, things like reading bills seem to become less important.

As does the deficit, which those fiscal hawks are famously very worried about when it is Democrats adding to it… but not so much when future generations are saddled with trillions of dollars in debt so that the uber-wealthy can get a tax cut now.

In any case, now that the Senate is taking up the measure, we believe that there needs to be an honest discussion over what is in the so-called BBB and how it would affect different groups of Americans.

However, Republicans seem determined to prevent that from happening.

One after another, from top White House officials to the Speaker of the House, they went on the network talk shows on Sunday to blatantly lie about the legislation and its impact… which they wouldn’t have to do if it actually benefited the American people.

While the bill contains many troubling provisions, the Democrats’ main lines of attack are that it redistributes wealth from regular Americans to the nation’s wealthiest people, and that it does so by cutting essential programs like Medicaid and food assistance, which will result in millions of people losing their health insurance coverage. Finally, Democrats, as well as the very few GOP lawmakers who practice what they preach, lament that the legislation will add trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Presumably, most voters won’t like any of these things once they find out about them, which is why Republicans are just lying about them.

For example, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought falsely claimed that “no one will lose [Medicaid] coverage as a result of this bill.”

For one, that is not what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), on which both parties usually rely for assessing the potential impact of any legislation, found.

More importantly, for the purpose of exposing this as a lie, seconds before Vought lied about the impact of the legislation, he actually listed two groups of people who would lose Medicaid coverage, i.e., “illegal immigrants” and “able-bodied, working adults.”

Perhaps Vought considers them less than human (which is quite possible), but you can’t say in one breath that you want to take coverage away from these groups and in the next that “no one will lose coverage.”

By the way, it is important to note that the talking point of 1.4 million “illegals” getting Medicaid coverage is in itself highly misleading. They are not fraudulently getting benefits. Instead, more than a dozen states (which administer their own Medicaid programs with federal funding), have chosen to extend benefits to the children of undocumented immigrants or pregnant women in that group.

With regard to the cost of the legislation, we turn to holier-than-thou House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who routinely spends his Sundays on talk shows bearing false witness.

He did so once again yesterday, when he lied to the American people about the trillions of dollars that, according to CBO (as well as many other credible organizations), the bill would add to the federal debt.

“It’s not gonna add to the debt,” Johnson said on Meet the Press.

Well, that clears it up.

There is just one tiny question we have for Johnson: If this majestic legislation is not going to add to the debt and in fact cuts spending, why does it include a provision to increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion?

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While we wait, let’s not forget that actual budget hawks like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who called the bill a “debt bomb ticking,” and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who said the “GOP will own the debt once they vote for this,” are speaking the truth where others choose to lie.

While some of the Sunday talk show hosts tried to fact-check the likes of Vought and Johnson, that is simply not enough.

The American people deserve to be told the truth of what’s in the bill, so it doesn’t make sense to keep inviting the same known liars to these shows to talk about it.