DANA MILBANK

Texas Republican Keith Self, a putative deficit hawk affiliated with the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was categorical in his opposition to the Senate-passed “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which will add about $4 trillion to the federal debt.

“The Senate’s version of the BBB is morally and fiscally bankrupt,” he proclaimed on X at 6:50 p.m. on July 2.

Three hours later, he posted again, saying he had voted to block the House from taking up the Senate legislation. “House leadership wants to cram this broken bill down our throats by rushing it to the floor,” he wrote. “Ultimately, this is an issue of morality,” he added, saying the House had a “rare opportunity” to “begin restoring fiscal sanity” by rejecting the Senate bill.

Then Donald Trump began threatening him and the other holdouts. “What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES,” the president posted on Truth Social after midnight Thursday. In another post, he wrote, “FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE. RIDICULOUS!!!”

Self, swallowing his “morality” and his dignity, went onto the floor and changed his vote to “yes” to advance the Senate bill — without securing a single change to it. So did every single member of the Freedom Caucus.

That feeble wheeze you heard on Capitol Hill this week was the last breath of small-government conservatism.

No one should be surprised that the so-called deficit hawks folded in the nation’s hour of need. Their unwillingness to stand up for their principles has become a standing joke. Members of the House Freedom Caucus squawk with outrage whenever House GOP leaders or Senate Republicans come up with a fiscally reckless plan, they swear they will vote “no” — and then they quietly retreat to their cages, usually after receiving some offer of future fiscal restraint that never materializes.

This time, there were at least 28 holdouts, according to Punchbowl News’s Haley Talbot, who maintains the “Big Mad Index” of potential defectors during key votes. (Some were moderates, but most were Freedom Caucus types.) To account for the holdouts’ past behavior, Talbot added a new category to her index: “Fiscal Hawks KTF.” Known To Fold.

Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican and member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, spent the early part of this week telling anybody who would listen that he was adamantly, passionately and inalterably opposed to the tax bill that the Senate passed. It was, he said, a “non-starter” and not “serious.” He said there was “probably not” anything that could be done to change his mind by Republican leaders — or even by a “mad” Trump: “I don’t know what to tell him.”

After Norman restated his opposition to the bill at a meeting of the House Rules Committee late July 1, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat, observed that the Senate-passed legislation was doomed - “unless you cave, which has become kind of a pattern around here.”

The next day, Norman caved.

The only commitment he had received in exchange for his vote? The White House acknowledged that “we’re deficit hawks and they know that,” he told Axios’s Victoria Knight.

Maybe he should have held out for a pat on the head, too.

These surrenders to Trump’s demands are so predictable that some Republicans are defensive about the perception of meekness. “The president of the United States didn’t give us an assignment,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) protested to reporters. “We’re not a bunch of little bitches around here, okay? I’m a member of Congress.”

The two are not mutually exclusive, Congressman.

But this wasn’t just another routine cave-in by conservatives. This was probably the last chance for those who purport to care about fiscal responsibility to make a dent in the trajectory of the federal government’s finances — and they surrendered utterly. Conservatives who practice the traditional religion of limited government, internationalism and freedom had already lost control of the party to President Donald Trump’s big-government MAGA nationalists. This legislation, which passed 218-214, codifies and cements the shift to fiscal recklessness in the GOP. The consequences will be felt for the next decade and more.

The legislation heading to Trump’s desk will add some $4.1 trillion to the debt over the next decade, including higher interest, as entities such as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Congressional Budget Office have documented. The libertarian Cato Institute calculates that the bill will add more than $6 trillion to the debt. These figures are on top of the trillions in debt we were already on course to incur. The final legislation is almost $1 trillion more expensive than the original House version of the bill, which Freedom Caucus lawmakers also opposed as a fiscal train wreck before voting for it. The just-passed legislation raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. And it accelerates the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare — now just seven years in front of us.

Lawmakers didn’t even have the excuse of a national emergency, as they did for pandemic-era stimulus programs. After this, no congressional call for fiscal responsibility will ever be taken seriously again.

Just how bad is this from the perspective of the surviving limited-government conservatives? This bad: Things were actually better for them under President Joe Biden’s policies.

That’s the view of Ilya Somin, the B. Kenneth Simon chair in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In February, I had turned to Somin, a leading libertarian thinker, to assess the Trump administration’s early moves by the limited-government yardstick. In early July, I asked him to do the same for the “One Big Beautiful Bill” as passed by the Senate.

“Doing nothing, I think, would still be better” than the current legislation, he said, because “the bad outweighs the good” and this bill “worsens our already severe fiscal crisis.” It’s packed with immigration restrictions that will drag down economic growth. And it hides the true cost of the tax cuts behind an accounting gimmick — a gimmick that Democrats will likely use in the future to fund their own priorities without paying for them. “If they simply said, ‘Okay, we’ll just continue the policies that were in force in 2024 in the last Biden budget,’ that would be bad, but this is worse,” Somin argued. “It was bad under Biden, too — I’m not defending Biden -- but this will be even worse.”

It’s all a stunning turnabout for the party of Reagan. There was a time, Somin pointed out, when Republicans “were excited about balancing budgets and cutting spending. Now they’re excited about tariffs and deportations.” And the reckoning — the insolvency of our entitlement programs — is around the corner. “The closer we get to the cliff, the more I despair,” he told me.

Dana Milbank is a political columnist for the Washington Post, where this appeared. Follow him on Twitter @Milbank.

Email dana.milbank@washpost.com