Statehouse beat: Will effects of Big Beautiful Bill embolden voters to empower Dems?

A Washington Post poll, for instance, found that 42% of those polled oppose the bill, with only 23% supporting it — and that was the most positive of multiple national polls on the legislation.

That 35% of those polled had no opinion on the budget bill is not surprising in a country where, on Election Day 2024, the leading Google search was, “Did Biden drop out?�

The public’s distaste for the legislation is unlikely to improve as more people become aware of its myriad disastrous effects, particularly when millions of Americans (and hundreds of thousands of West Virginians) lose health coverage and food assistance, and as hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, grocery stores, wholesalers and farms begin to close or scale back operations.

Yet, Republicans in Congress ramrodded the legislation through by the narrowest of margins. Were it not for the heroics of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ 8½-hour floor speech, it would have passed literally in the dead of night.

And while West Virginians will suffer disproportionately under the legislation, the state’s four member Congressional delegation were practically gleeful in their support for a monstrosity that imposes the largest cuts to vitally needed programs in the nation’s history, while simultaneously exploding the national debt by $3 trillion.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., even had the audacity to announce the nomination of her son, Moore Capito, for U.S. Attorney mere hours after voting for the bill.

Perhaps the best historical parallel was passage of the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890.

Like the Big Beautiful Bill, the legislation to exponentially increase tariffs on imported goods narrowly passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate, with many supporters of the bill fearing a backlash.

Sure enough, as the tariffs caused consumer prices to soar, voters a few months later expressed their discontent by flipping the House from a narrow GOP majority (179 Republicans to 152 Democrats) to a Democratic supermajority (238-86).

Republicans maintained a narrow majority in the Senate after the 1890 election since only a third of incumbents were up for reelection, but that changed two years later when Democrats achieved majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1858.

They also took back the White House in 1892, as Democrat Grover Cleveland defeated Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison, becoming the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

Will history repeat itself? Logic would suggest so, but not much about the current state of politics is logical.

Unfortunately, large swaths of the American electorate are uninformed or ill-informed, and we can anticipate that right-wing media outlets and bloggers will spin things so that blame for the horrific impacts of the BBB will fall on Democrats, socialists, immigrants, transgender athletes, or whoever happens the preeminent boogeyman of the moment.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and company are weaving outright fabrications and lies about the legislation, claiming for instance, that it eliminates income tax on Social Security benefits.

Will Republicans continue to persuade a majority of Americans and West Virginians to vote against their own best interests? Will Democrats be able to put aside petty feuds and work together to convince voters that they aren’t the wild-eyed extremists that right-wing media portrays them to be, and to reclaim their mantle as the party of working class?

Although history may be on their side, I wish I could be more optimistic.

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That Gov. Patrick Morrisey opted not to give state workers a day off June 19th for the Juneteenth federal holiday because of “continuing fiscal challenges facing West Virginia,� and then turned around just two weeks later and gave those same state employees an extra paid holiday on July 3 sent a message, loud and clear.

I don’t think Morrisey is a bigot, but he recognizes that Trump and many of his MAGA followers are, and acted accordingly.

Ditto for his line-item veto eliminating funding for the Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs.

Once again, in a state that needs to be doing everything it can to attract newcomers, Morrisey is sending a clear message that not everyone is welcome here.

Meanwhile, Morrisey’s concerns over “continuing fiscal challenges� three weeks later turned into state Treasurer Larry Pack declaring that West Virginia had finished another fiscal year with a “massive surplus,� and calling on Morrisey to call a special session to pursue additional income tax cuts.

Of course, the supposed “massive surplus� is the result of ongoing phony baloney budgeting in which revenue estimates for fiscal 2024-25 were shrunk by nearly a half-billion dollars below actual 2023-24 revenue collections.

In reality, actual 2024-25 collections of $5.519 billion were nearly $200 million below 2023-24 collections, and down a whopping $964 million from fiscal 2022-23. That’s over a billion dollars of lost revenue.

And you wonder why West Virginia can’t have nice things.

In fact, you have to go back to fiscal 2020-21 to find a year when the state took in less revenue. Of course, that was a time when many facets of the economy were on hold for the pandemic.

Income tax collections are down 20%, from $2.66 billion in fiscal 2022-23 to $2.13 billion in the just-completed budget year.

One of the talking points for cutting income taxes in 2023 was that the cuts would pay for themselves by generating both economic and population growth.

However, the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that from May 2024 to May 2025, West Virginia ranked dead last in the U.S. in job growth, with a rate of –1.36%, or 9,900 jobs lost. The national average was 1.08% growth.

And that doesn’t count the pending loss of more than 600 coal mining jobs as layoffs permeate the southern coalfields, as demand for coal exports has plunged in spite of Trump’s constant promotion of “beautiful clean coal.�

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When I wrote in my last column about how the current legislative leadership has obliterated the interim committee process, I failed to take a gander at the June interim meeting schedule.

Meeting off-campus at Stonewall Resort June 22-24, legislators managed to string together a grand total of seven meetings over the course of three days. At that exhausting pace, the Legislature managed an average of just over two meetings per day.

For comparison purposes, during interim meetings in June 2018 (back when I was working five days a week and not getting two checks a month for doing nothing), legislators participated in a total of 24 meetings over three days.

By restricting themselves to a total of seven hours of meetings this June, legislators managed to avoid even giving lip service to the most pressing issues facing the state.

Legislators couldn’t find even a moment to discuss issues like flood mitigation, flood relief, PEIA reform, the exploding cost of the Hope Scholarship program and the subsequent defunding of public schools, or perennial issues like road construction, economic development, or job creation.

Notably, July is nearly half over, and the long-rumored July special session on PEIA is nowhere to be found.

The legislative supermajority has dismantled the interim committee process, intended to permit legislators — in the off-season — to study complex issues facing the state, because they don’t want answers. As Jack Nicholson famously stated, they can’t handle the truth.

It’s easier to ignore the myriad problems facing the state than to actually bear down and try to find solutions, which tend to be complicated and costly.

Similarly, the legislative supermajority doesn’t seem to want to know the truth regarding whether Delegate Ian T. Masters, R-Berkeley, authored an antisemitic remark on a social media account bearing his name. Indeed, they can’t even bring themselves to condemn the comment, regardless of the author.

Granted, as is typical for out-of-town interims, legislators did make nine site visits during their stay in Lewis County, to places like MannCave Distillery, Lambert’s Winery, and the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.

Much to the chagrin of my fellow statehouse reporters, eight of the nine visitations were closed to the public and media. I’ve covered more than my share of out-of-town interims, each of which featured multiple local site visitations, and never once were any of those restricted to legislators only.

I’m willing to presume that the visitations were closed for logistical reasons, and are not another example of the level of contempt the legislative supermajority displays toward members of the media.

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Finally, I was shocked to learn of the death of John Law, a longtime statehouse mainstay who influenced state health care policy first as an industry lobbyist and later as spokesman for the DHHR, always doing so with good humor even in the most turbulent moments. He was one of a kind and will be missed.