Reconciliation 2.0: Time to Get Ready
(Updated May 12th with latest plan.)
Last year, against feeble Democratic opposition, the MAGA regime was able to use a reconciliation bill to ram through their “BBB” bill that granted huge tax cuts for billionaires while slashing Medicaid and nutrition for low-income children. Now they want to do it again – they're calling it "Reconciliation 2.0."
But 2026 is not 2025.
Due in large part to massive and growing popular resistance from people like us:
MAGA's demand for additional funding to expand their militarized ethnic-cleansing campaigns against nonwhite immigrants is still being blocked by a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
The SAVE ACT, their highly partisan voter-suppression bill, is also stalled in Congress.
Make no mistake, Recon2 is, first of all, an acknowledgment of our growing power to block the MAGA agenda; and second, it is also a naked power-grab aimed at establishing authoritarian one-party rule.
A Reconciliation bill has to pass by majority vote in both House and Senate. Last year, despite MAGA's political strength, the “BBB” barely squeaked to victory. If just one more Republican senator had voted "nay," or two House members had done so, the “BBB” would have died a well-deserved death.
The un-democratic reconciliation process is intended to circumvent a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and override Democratic votes in the House. House and Senate Republicans are currently drafting the legislation behind closed doors without any participation or input from Democrats. Rumor is that it will increase ICE/CBP/DHS funding by an additional $71.7 billion (or more) over and above past funding and standard appropriations. Rumor also has it that they may try to jam in $1 billion for the Trump ballroom that was originally pitched as costing $200 million entirely funded by private corporate donors rather than taxpayers like us.
We are confident that our San Francisco members of the House and our California Senators will vote against Recon2. But their votes alone will not be sufficient. The only way to defeat Recon2 is to generate so much public opposition nationwide that either four Republican Senators vote against it, or two Republican House members do so (assuming that all Democrats are opposed). Those are not impossible numbers because almost that number voted against the BBB reconciliation bill last year.
Today, MAGA and Trump are lower in the polls. There are cracks and disaffection in their base over Epstein and the Iran War. Seven Republican senators and 16 House members are retiring from politics and not running for re-election. By many counts, the number of Republican incumbents at risk of losing in November is significantly higher than the number of Democrats. If one Republican in the Senate or two in the House switch from how they voted on “BBB” last year, we can block their Recon2 assault.
It's possible one reason they are rushing fast to enact Recon2 before June 1st is that they fear Republican incumbents at risk of losing their seats in November may balk at voting for a deeply unpopular bill too close to an election where their personal power is at stake.
So we of Indivisible need to do everything in our power to make this Reconciliation 2.0 bill, and the ICE/CBP abuses it is intended to enable, an immediate public issue that Republican incumbents are forced to confront. We need to take action now.
As Curtis Mayfield once sang, "People get ready..."
