A Letter to the Cowards In Congress and Mega Bill Commentary

Below is a letter I wrote to my State Representatives, after they passed Trump’s Mega Bill in the House today. Following the letter is some more commentary on the bill.

Dear Montana Congressional Representatives Steve Daines, Tim Sheehy, Ryan Zinke, and Troy Downing,

I sincerely hope that one day you will understand what it is like to clock in at your minimum wage job and starve through your shift because you can only afford to eat one meal that day. Over 80,000 of your constituents relied on SNAP in 2024. Your Yes vote on the Trump Mega Bill just took that meal from some of them.

In 2022, over 200,000 people relied on Medicaid and CHIP in Montana for insurance, the working poor who rely on this assistance will now face a copay, increased paperwork when applying for and renewing their Medicaid, and the state must take on massive debts to cover the loss of federal aid. That decision will directly threaten the lives of children, the elderly, people with disabilities, and people with preexisting and limiting health conditions. This will also close rural hospitals, as they scramble for money from Medicaid they rely on to keep the lights on and salaries paid. On July 1st Senator Daines called these programs “...wasteful spending...” and claimed “Montanans will be better off because of this bill…”. How will blood on your hands better the working poor of my home state?

Your Yes vote will also make poor college graduates pay more back on their student loans every month. The average student loan borrower in Montana owes 34.2 thousand dollars. The average college graduate in Montana makes about 38 thousand dollars in the fifth year after they graduate. Those folks would typically apply for a SAVE repayment plan, which has now been cut, and has been replaced with Trump’s RAP repayment plan. Graduates that fit these parameters can expect their monthly payment to shoot up about a hundred dollars under this new plan.

One hundred dollars may not seem like a lot of money to them, Daines was worth 32 million dollars in 2018. To the rest of us though, that is a month of groceries, or gas, or a utility payment, an essential part of the monthly budget. Deliberately choosing to increase the cost of living for residents in the state with the most people living paycheck to paycheck nationwide, some 67 percent of residents, is inhumane and morally deplorable. That statistic is from 2010, and was the most recent available data. By the way, Governor Gianforte is worth 189 million dollars, his net worth could fund nearly two thirds of the state’s yearly spending on Medicaid.

The state is facing a MASSIVE cost of living crisis, and ripping key assistance programs and jobs from the working poor only exacerbates this problem. You should be ashamed of yourself and your fellow Montana U.S. Representatives. Your constituents will not forget your selfishness, Montana will fight you on this.

May your conscience hang heavy and burden your life with insurmountable guilt until the day you die.

Sincerely,

Roxy Strachan

Commentary:

So. I’m pretty pissed off right now. All of these cuts to services that aid the poorest in our country will kill people. I saw someone online say this is Trump declaring war on the poor and I think that is a loaded but pretty accurate way to describe what is going on.

ICE

More people will die as this funding is redirected to the unconstitutional national police force parading as ICE. A force by the way, which seems to possess unchecked power and operate at the complete whim of the President. They can be deployed in plain clothes, or fully masked, on lawfully gathered groups of citizens as we saw in LA just weeks ago. What kind of government does that sound like? We will see even more unconstitutional deportations in the coming years with the tripling of the ICE budget. This bill also caps the number of immigration judges to 800 nationwide, gumming up the legal pathways through the immigration system even more, allowing the GOP to retroactively ignore the fifth amendment in immigration cases. Not that they haven’t been doing that since January through illegal deportations of citizens, ignoring the right to due process, and their recent fight to dismantle birthright citizenship. It’ll just get worse, like a lot worse.

Taxes

The wealthy will see massive tax breaks, about 11 and a half percent on those earning 500,000 a year or more. While the poorest people, those making 15,000 a year or less, will see a tax increase of about 12 percent in 2027. This could jump to 73 percent by 2033. This is real. Those stats come from a fact sheet by the House Committee On The Budget, and I encourage you to read and share this sheet as it’s one of the best pieces I’ve found while researching this bill.

Medicaid/SNAP

To briefly circle back on cuts, I have seen a lot of defenders of this bill say it only affects people who are on these programs and don’t have jobs. I have applied for both these programs in the last year and you must have proof of employment (or proof you are physically unable to work, or are in school or caring for a dependent full time) to receive assistance, so that’s a null propaganda point. Also, this bill requires people receiving assistance on these programs to reapply much more frequently than currently required. That is bad. If you have applied for Medicaid and SNAP, you know how long and tedious the application process already is. Requiring folks to reapply more frequently disenfranchises those who already have barriers to entry in this system; for example ESL applicants who could struggle with understanding these complicated forms, or those who psychically can’t spend hours in queues at these offices multiple times a year due to health reasons, having childcare duties, or simply people who have jobs and can’t/don’t want to deal with this tedious process more often than needed. Finally, I bring up the point of humanity. Have some.

This is not my fight, or your fight alone. The best thing I think individuals can do is learn as much as you can about what is happening and figure out how you feel about it, and then talk to people about it. Organize in your community! Or go to a city council meeting! Protest! For me, I only know how I feel about something once I write about it, so that’s what this is. Thank you if you’ve read this whole thing, it’s a bit different from what I usually post.

If you also live in Montana and wish to contact your congressional reps, information can be found here.

A full list of sources for this post can be found here.