Cave Men

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 03, 2025

 

David Shor said something a few weeks ago that’s been bugging me.

 

Shor is a well-known Democratic data analyst. Last month he noted on Twitter that murder rates are lower in blue areas than red areas when you adjust for demographics. Try recalculating without the “demographic” adjustment, one user retorted, their insinuation perfectly clear.

 

The unadjusted rates are also lower in blue areas, Shor replied. Then came this: “The issue is that conservatives lazily and incorrectly assume it’s because of demographics because they are deeply uncurious about policy.”

 

That irked me—and not merely because he sullied the good name of conservatism by using it as a synonym for “right-wing,” which hasn’t been fair since 2015.

 

Democrats in New York City just nominated a guy for mayor who’s promising to freeze rents (which he can’t do) and jack up the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has enough of a national following to be a legit player in the 2028 presidential race. Neoliberal wonks with their noses buried in Abundance may have more thoughtful things to say about policy than the average right-winger, but left-wingers intent on re-running the same old failed experiments in hopes of better results are in no position to throw stones.

 

It’s not just economics either. Contemplate these numbers and ask yourself which side takes immigration policy more seriously. Incurious: How dare Shor say such a thing?

 

Then I read this report from NOTUS about the home stretch of negotiations on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and thought, “You know, he has a point.”

 

Trump still doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp about what his signature legislative achievement does. According to three sources with direct knowledge of the comments, the president told Republicans at [a Wednesday] meeting that there are three things Congress shouldn’t touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

 

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member responded to Trump, according to the three sources.

 

Our last president also had trouble grasping the details of his own policies, but that’s because age was turning his brain into mulch. With Trump, one gets the sense that incuriosity really is, and always has been, the problem. He might or might not be intelligent enough to understand complex legislation if he applied himself, but he doesn’t apply himself because he doesn’t care. Apart from a few core nationalist priorities like border enforcement and tariffs, his interest in policy isn’t more complicated than showing “strength” and notching “wins.” The details are, well, a detail.

 

That attitude now defines his party. Trump’s voters share it almost universally, but many of their representatives in Congress do not, which puts the latter in a bind. Should they indulge their native interest in policy by resisting legislation that harms the country if doing so would deny the president a “win”? Or should they embrace incuriosity and carry out the will of their base, as democracy typically requires?

 

In providing the decisive votes to pass the bill this afternoon, Republican fiscal hawks chose both. They made a performance of their misgivings all week to show off their supposed seriousness about policy, then capitulated en masse by supporting the legislation. The spectacle they made of themselves reduced fiscal conservatism to a farce worthy of ridicule.

 

Culmination.

 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act may be the low point of the Trump era. (So far.)

 

There’s room for debate, of course. The two months that followed the 2020 election were arguably worse. But Trump’s coup attempt did ultimately fail, and his party in Congress was less supportive of his antics at the time than it sometimes appeared amid the grandstanding from Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. More Senate Republicans supported certifying Joe Biden’s victory than opposed doing so.

 

Admittedly, it’s counterintuitive that a duly-enacted federal statute like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act might be deemed more of an authoritarian disgrace than everything else that’s happened since January 20. For once, Trump did things by the book instead of via some dubious executive order. And no matter how much you dislike the bill, there’s nothing alarmingly radical about the governing party setting bad fiscal policy like there is about, say, shipping detained immigrants off to a gulag in El Salvador. How can this be a low point?

 

To start with, consider the degree of difficulty.

 

As a sheer feat of autocratic strength, getting this bill through a reluctant legislature may be more impressive than the “rigged election” saga. Not only did Trump succeed in this case, I suspect he prevailed over a greater degree of Republican resistance than he faced in January 2021. Various populist cranks in the House GOP back then seemed earnestly bought in on conspiracies about a stolen victory, after all. Whereas I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone in the conference today who sounds sincerely sold on the merits of legislation that will accrue another $3.3 trillion in debt, beyond the usual “rah rah Trump” boilerplate.

 

The president got Congress to pass a bill that’s hated inside and outside the Capitol, and he did it by overtly threatening to end the careers of those who refused. It’s not even a bill whose terms he cared about beyond insisting that it be “big” and “beautiful.” “Eat this slop or I’ll hurt you,” he told the legislative branch, “and do it now, before July 4”—and lawmakers obeyed. In the history of the United States, Congress has never appeared more feeble than it does right now.

 

The past week was a showcase of all sorts of Trump-era political pathologies, in fact. There was the usual grumbling to the media by congressional Republicans about their woeful political predicament—anonymously, of course. There was the familiar game of “hot potato” over whose job it is to stand up to the president, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski begging House Republicans to improve the Senate bill that she, er, voted for. There was Trump himself boorishly browbeating critics for opposing a policy that he himself seems not to comprehend beyond its most simple, crowd-pleasing, fiscally irresponsible gimmicks.

 

And there were oodles of lib-owning, each example stupider than the last.

 

On Wednesday, Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio announced that he’d had a change of heart about the bill. He had voted against the original House legislation in May, but now planned to support the even worse Senate version. Why? Quote: “Democrats’ reaction helped me persuade that, wow, maybe this bill does, does do some really good things.”

 

J.D. Vance broke the news about another belated convert on Thursday morning as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a lengthy floor speech attacking the legislation. Vance claimed on Twitter that a Republican congressman texted him, “I was undecided on the bill but then I watched Hakeem Jeffries performance and now I’m a firm yes.”

 

Dumbest of all was Trump flunky Jason Miller, who simplified the stakes of the debate for wary Republicans yesterday. “You can vote with [Donald Trump], or you can vote with the Democrats,” he wrote on X. “If you vote with the Democrats, you’re not voting with the Republicans. Buckle the f— up. It’s a binary choice.”

 

In hindsight, David Shor was too kind. “Incurious” implies that Republicans are engaging with policy in superficial ways. In reality they’re not engaging at all, at least not in matters where the president has political skin in the game. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the culmination of a decade of the cultish, idiotic populist right being conditioned to treat “policy” as nothing more meaningful than a series of us-and-them loyalty tests. Even the most momentous fiscal reforms, with implications for tens of millions of people, are simple gut checks about whether you’re with Trump or with the enemy.

 

All of which would have been dispiriting enough without fiscal hawks seemingly deliberately making a mockery of conservatism.

 

Folding like origami.

 

“House Conservatives Warn They Can’t Back Senate Bill to Enact Trump’s Agenda,” the New York Times reported on June 24, in a piece written by Catie Edmondson.

 

The story was accompanied by a photo of—who else?—Rep. Chip Roy of Texas looking pensive. Roy is an old-school Tea Partier, always ready with a quote about the disgust he feels for Congress’ latest indefensible spending splurge. “I would not vote for it as it is,” he said last week of the Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As recently as Tuesday, he was posting point-by-point analyses on Twitter explaining why the bill was a nonstarter.

 

You know where this is going.

 

Yesterday, unwilling to wait for the inevitable capitulation, the Times got a jump on the news cycle. “The $3 Trillion Question at the Capitol: Will Conservatives Cave (Again)?” the paper asked, with Edmondson again doing the honors. No less than four times in the past four months, she noted, have some of the very principled conservatives of the House GOP conference made noise about thwarting some unpalatable measure that was before the House, only to crumple under pressure from Trump.

 

That story also featured a photo of Roy, this time with his head in his hands. By Thursday morning his Twitter posts had shifted to explaining how, actually, the Senate bill is a win for conservatives on Medicaid. Hours later, he completed the cave by voting for the legislation.

 

I don’t fault Chip Roy, a politician, for being a politician. The Republican Party since 2015 is a comprehensive study in political cowardice; it feels churlish to single him out. What I fault him for is persisting in embarrassing ideological peacocking every time a terrible bill, which we all know conservatives are going to roll over for, hits the House floor. You can prioritize good policy or you can prioritize getting reelected: Just choose one and own it. Is that too much to ask?

 

Apparently it is. One House conservative after another humiliated themselves this week by denouncing the Senate bill, only to turn around and fold like origami.

 

Rep. Keith Self, another Texan, called the bill “morally and fiscally bankrupt” and voted against opening debate on it on Wednesday evening. Then House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump corralled him and promised him and a few other holdouts some magic beans. In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Self changed his vote. On Thursday he voted for the bill itself.

 

Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana originally announced that she too would vote against opening debate, but would support the bill itself if it made it to the floor, the sort of nonsensical position for which she’s well-known among political junkies. In the end, she too had her arm twisted and voted for both.

 

Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, proclaimed on Wednesday that his group wouldn’t support opening debate “until we iron out some of the deficit problems with the bills.” He even predicted that the vote that evening would fail and called for the House and Senate to meet “somewhere in the middle” on a compromise bill. After the Freedom Caucus met yesterday afternoon to discuss the matter, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina emerged and warned House GOP leadership to start sending people home for the evening. “Don’t keep the staff there,” he said. “Freedom Caucus isn’t gonna vote tonight.”

 

Harris and Norman both ended up voting to open debate and to pass the bill as-is, of course. In Norman’s case, conversations with the White House appear to have changed his mind in a matter of a few hours.

 

The conversion of Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee may have been even more miraculous. By one measure, it was a matter of minutes between him being “firmly undecided” on the bill to leaning in favor after a conversation with Trump.

 

And then there was the aforementioned Warren Davidson, who voted no on the original House legislation in May for the sensible reason that “promising someone else will cut spending in the future does not cut spending. Deficits do matter and this bill grows them now. The only Congress we can control is the one we’re in.” Discovering that the libs hated the version that the Senate barfed up is what finally brought him around.

 

If you like, you can tell yourself a story that all of this empty conservative posturing was a bluff designed to secure unspecified concessions from Trump and Johnson. The problem is that literally no one is fooled by that bluff anymore. No one takes the Freedom Caucus seriously—not even the Times, which couldn’t resist running a story anticipating yet another cave even before the final vote on the bill was held. The paper would have had egg on its face had Roy and the rest held firm today, and the editors knew it. Imagine how confident they must have been in a conservative surrender to move forward with the story anyway.

 

Why, then, did House conservatives bother talking tough in the days before the bill was passed? I can’t understand it. It makes no sense to invite accusations of cowardice by raising expectations that you don’t intend to meet. They’ve never looked like more of a joke.

 

Indignity.

 

Maybe it’s political muscle memory at work, as threats about blocking bills were somewhat more credible in the Paul Ryan days. Old habits die hard.

 

Or maybe venting conservative grievances before rubber-stamping the latest Trump garbage serves some psychological need for them. If the president allows you to perform passion plays about smaller government provided that you vote how he wants, maybe that’s all you need to reassure yourself that Reaganites like you still belong in this miserable party.

 

But the spectacle they made of themselves this week was grotesque. There’s dignity in honesty, and Roy et al. could have been honest about their votes. “I’m afraid of Donald Trump and more afraid of his voters,” they might have said, “so I supported a bill that I can’t defend. If I had voted no I would have lost my seat and been replaced by someone less conservative and I didn’t want that.”

 

That would have been candid and true, albeit leaving the question unanswered of why we should care who holds Chip Roy’s seat if that person isn’t going to vote conservative anyway.

 

Instead, by performing an embarrassing caricature of resolute fiscal hawkery, their “I can’t support this bill” bluster felt like a sort of political minstrel show. They knew they would cave in the end and they knew their performance would lead many Americans to mock conservatism as ridiculous, but they went ahead with it anyway. They couldn’t even muster the nerve to delay passage past July 4 to prove they’re not following the president’s imperious and arbitrary deadlines. Rarely have leftists managed to demean the traditional right as effectively.

 

If the Tea Party remnant in Congress had any dignity, they’d resign or acknowledge forthrightly that they’re stooges for a movement over which they wield little influence. But pervasive indignity is how we got here in the first place. And that, even more so than incuriosity, is the problem.