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midterm elections
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Means Bigger Electric Bills for Millions
The elimination of tax credits for clean energy will have a disastrous impact on consumers... and potentially on the GOP’s chances in the midterms.
Jul 19, 2025
Millions of Americans across the country will receive higher electric bills because of President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which was signed into law on July 4.
The culprit here is that the OBBB eliminated tax credits for solar and wind energy. According to research done by the group Energy Innovation, average electric rates could rise by an additional 18% by 2035. For an average household this translates into $170 a year. Some states will experience even larger increases in electric bills. For example, in Oklahoma, a state which generates a lot of its energy from wind, annual prices will go up as much as $540 a year.
Ironically, the increase in electric rates may well hit Republican states harder than their Democratic counterparts. The five biggest losers from the OBBB in terms of increased electric bills are Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. The conservative Washington Examiner points out:
With the One Big Beautiful Bill Act now law, there could be a spike in consumer energy bills in states represented by Republicans and handouts to blue-state residents. That is terrible news for everyday Americans and for members of the GOP hoping to hold on to their narrow majority in the Senate. However, it could have been much worse. In theory, it should have been easy for congressional Republicans to work with the White House on a spending plan that lowers prices and taxes with the added benefit of protecting vulnerable GOP senators in Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina. But because states generate electricity differently, this would mean reversing a perhaps too hastily made, ill-thought-out campaign promise: the elimination of the renewable tax credits put in place by the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
The Trump administration’s mistaken focus on eliminating tax credits for clean energy flies in the face of two trends in the energy market. First, demand for energy is rising to an all-time high in the United States and clean energy (wind and solar) is making up an increasingly large share of energy production. So, just when this increased energy is needed, the cost will go up significantly because of the elimination of the tax credits for wind and solar energy under the Inflation Reduction Act. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, puts it quite simply, “We’re effectively raising taxes on the country’s main sources of new power at a time when electricity prices are already rising.”
The rise in electric prices because of the OBBB are just simply arithmetic . How could the Trump administration be so misguided? The answer is simple and disturbing at the same time. President Trump and his administration simply do not understand how renewable energy works. As an example of this line of thinking, I point to an op-ed that Energy Secretary Chris Wright did for the New York Post:
How much would you pay for an Uber if you didn’t know when it would pick you up or where it was going to drop you off? Probably not much. Yet this is the same effect that variable generation sources like wind and solar have on our power grids. You never know if these energy sources will actually be able to produce electricity when you need it—because you don’t know if the sun will be shining or the wind blowing. Even so, the federal government has subsidized these sources for decades, resulting in higher electricity prices and a less stable grid.
Wright’s argument also misses the point that the fossil fuels part of the American energy market is increasingly unreliable. Research from the Center for American Progress points out that “the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme heat, wildfires, winter storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events is straining the grid, while also highlighting the vulnerabilities and lack of preparedness from conventional fossil fuel generation.”
The good news here is that clean energy advocates are fighting back and letting people know that their electric rates are going up—and who is responsible. Politico reports that “one such group, Clean Energy for America, is deploying billboard ads next week targeting seven of the lawmakers considered most vulnerable in the 2026 races. The ads in lawmakers’ districts say the Republican ‘just voted to raise your electricity bill’ and directs readers to RepublicanRateHike.org, a website the organization created. The ads target Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.), Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), David Valadao (R-Calif.), Gabe Evans (R-Colo.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) and Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa).”
It is essential to view the rate increases from the OBBB on top of those utility rate increases already in the pipeline. The group Powerlines points out that “Q2 2025, utilities requested or received approval for over $9 billion in rate increases, including approximately $7.3 billion in new requests and $1.7 billion in approved rate increases. This brings total requested and approved rate increases for the first half of 2025 to approximately $29 billion.”
For consumers energy issues come down to the bottom line. Millions of Americans will be paying much more for their electricity because of Trump’s OBBB. This burden will fall disproportionally on those on fixed or low incomes. According to research by Columbia University, roughly 34 million Americans are energy insecure, meaning that they went without food or medicine to pay utility bills or they set their heating or cooling at an unhealthy level.
By all accounts, the 2026 midterm elections will be close. A few thousand votes here and there may well decide who controls the House of Representatives. The OBBB’s boost of electric prices may be the one thing that pushes Democrats over the top.
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Sanders Says Every Republican Who Backed Trump-GOP Budget 'Must Pay a Price at the Ballot Box'
"They do not deserve to be re-elected and they must be defeated," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Jul 04, 2025
As communities across the United States braced for impact after congressional Republicans approved the biggest Medicaid and nutrition assistance cuts in the nation's history, Sen. Bernie Sanders said Thursday that every lawmaker who supported the budget legislation "must pay a price at the ballot box" in the 2026 midterms and beyond.
"This bill includes the largest cut ever to Medicaid in order to pay for the largest tax break for billionaires that we have ever seen," Sanders (I-Vt.), who is working to recruit progressive candidates for office, said after the House passed the legislation, sending it to President Donald Trump's desk.
"Make no mistake about it: This bill is a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans," said Sanders.
While some GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate voiced concerns about the bill's massive cuts to Medicaid and other programs as the measure moved through Congress, the legislation ultimately garnered near-unanimous support from the Republican caucus when it came time for the final votes. Just three out of 53 Republican senators and two out of 220 GOP representatives voted against the completed bill.
Analysts and advocates expect the legislation to inflict major damage across the country, shuttering rural hospitals, stripping health coverage and food aid from millions, raising costs for Medicare recipients, and devastating local economies.
Some of the pain will be concentrated in swing districts currently represented by Republican supporters of the budget package. For example, 64% of Rep. David Valadao's (R-Calif.) constituents in California's 22nd Congressional District rely on Medicaid.
Valadao is one of 10 Republicans targeted by an ad push that the advocacy group Protect Our Care launched following Thursday's vote in the House. The other targeted lawmakers are Reps. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), Young Kim (R-Calif.), Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.), Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.).
Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, said in a statement that "these Republicans just voted for the largest healthcare cuts in history in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations, and we're going to make sure that every single one of their constituents knows it."
"These Republicans betrayed their constituents and working Americans' healthcare for billionaire tax cuts," Woodhouse added, "and we're ready to go from the grassroots to the airwaves until every last one of them is held accountable."
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The GOP Is Already Planning to Win the Midterms... by Suppressing Your Vote!
The party is taking no chances on the upcoming plebiscite and has hatched a plan to rig all future federal elections with the goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
May 10, 2025
If you’re counting on the 2026 midterm elections to wrest control of U.S. Congress from the GOP, be forewarned.
The party is taking no chances on the upcoming plebiscite and has hatched a plan to rig all future federal elections with the goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
At the center of the plan is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, passed on April 10 by the House and pending before the Senate, and an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on March 25 with the Orwellian title of “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” And looming in the background, with the final word on either measure’s constitutionality, is the Supreme Court, packed with three Trump appointees and holding a long and sorry record of hostility to voting rights.
All of this is happening step by step, setting the stage for what could turn out to be the final chapter for American democracy.
The SAVE Act would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or some other documentary proof of citizenship in person every time they register or re-register to vote; require each state to take affirmative steps on an ongoing basis to ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote; and remove noncitizens from their official voter lists. It would also create a private right of action, after the fashion of the Texas anti-abortion law, to allow disgruntled individuals to sue election officials who register voters without obtaining proof of citizenship and establish criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for election officials who violate the act.
Trump’s executive order is no less extreme. Among its directives is a mandate for the Election Assistance Commission, an independent nonpartisan agency created by Congress, to require voters to submit documentary proof of their citizenship when using national voter registration forms. It would also stop states from counting mailed-in ballots votes that are sent in by Election Day but are delivered afterward, require recertification of all state voting systems to meet new security standards set by the EAC, and halt election assistance funding to states that do not comply with the terms of the order within 180 days. Perhaps most alarming, the order would allow the Department of Government Efficiency and the Department of Homeland Security to subpoena state records and use federal databases to review state voter registration lists.
There is some good news amid the darkness. On April 24, federal district court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who sits in Washington, D.C., issued a 120-page opinion and preliminary injunction, blocking the EAC from adding documentary proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states—not the president—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, holding that Trump’s order violated the separation of powers and referring to Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states:
The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [original text] Senators.
But while voting-rights groups have praised Kollar-Kotelly’s opinion, the judge left the rest of the executive order in place. More concerning, the ruling did nothing to derail the SAVE Act. As the judge noted, “Consistent with [the separation of powers doctrine], Congress is currently debating legislation that would effect many of the changes the president purports to order.”
The dangers posed by the SAVE Act cannot be understated. According to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center and affiliated organizations, more than 9% of American voting-age citizens, or 21.3 million people, don’t have a passport, birth certificate, naturalization papers, or other proof of citizenship readily available. “Voters of color, voters who change their names (most notably, married women), and younger voters would be most significantly affected,” the Brennan Center has warned.
In an article posted after the House approved the act, Democracy Docket, the digital election news platform founded by attorney Marc Elias, featured the views of a group of distinguished historians and voting experts on the act.
“There’s never been an attack on voting rights out of Congress like this,” Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Docket. “It’s always been the federal government trying to keep states in check on voting rights, for the most part.”
“Congress has never passed a voter-suppression law like this before,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s voting-rights program, said. “When it has exercised its power to regulate federal elections, Congress has usually done so to protect the freedom to vote. If this becomes law, it will be a new low for Congress.”
Princeton professor Sean Wilentz also weighed in with a dire assessment. “It’s the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history,” Wilentz said, characterizing the act as “the latest attempt to gut voting-rights advances that were made in the 1960s,” one more dangerous than the Jim Crow-era laws used in the South, because it is national in scope. “This is an attempt to destroy American democracy as we know it.”
All eyes now turn to the Senate, where Democrats have the power to filibuster the SAVE Act to prevent its passage unless 60 members vote to invoke cloture. Thus far, the Democrats seem to be holding the line, even in the face of persistent propaganda spewed by Trump, Elon Musk, and other Republicans that election fraud is rampant and that Democrats are “importing [undocumented] voters” to swing elections. In truth, of course, election fraud in the U.S. is miniscule, with some long-range state-by-state studies finding it occurs at rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025% of total votes cast.
Should any part of the SAVE Act pass and be signed into law, it will likely come before the Supreme Court, where its fate may turn on Chief Justice John Roberts, who along with Amy Coney Barrett, sometimes aligns with the panel’s liberals in big cases.
Roberts, however, has a long history of undermining voting rights that stretches back to his stint as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration and his role as a behind-the-scenes GOP consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
In 2013, as chief justice, he composed the disastrous majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. In 2019, he continued his anti-voting-rights crusade, writing the majority opinion Rucho v. Common Cause, which removed the issue of political gerrymandering (the practice of designing voting maps to benefit the party in power) from the jurisdiction of federal courts. And in 2021, he joined a 5-to-4 majority ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito that upheld Arizona laws prohibiting out-of-precinct voting and criminalizing the collection of mail-in ballots by third parties.
In the meantime, hundreds of lawyers have resigned from the Justice Department, repelled by Trump’s reactionary policies. As The New York Times has reported, the exodus has been especially felt hard at the department’s civil rights division, whose mission Trump has transformed from one of opposing voter suppression to stamping out phony claims of rampant election fraud.
All of this is happening step by step, setting the stage for what could turn out to be the final chapter for American democracy. Not only is it not too early to start thinking about the midterms, it may already be too late.
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