I'm Making a Movie on Tuesday

Jul 06, 2025

It’s another Sunday (kinda, because I don’t usually have plans to make a movie two days from now) and I’m reading this piece from Substack about the Big Stupid Bill.

Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill Republicans passed last week. Trump had demanded Congress pass the measure by July 4, and Republicans rammed it through despite the bill’s deep unpopularity and Congress’s lack of debate on it. When House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) presented Trump with the speaker’s gavel during the signing event, the symbolism of the gift was a little too on the nose.

Isn’t it reassuring that these decisions are being made after such careful deliberation? ~~And I wouldn’t mind taking that gavel and giving it to Trump right on the nose.~~

“Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age,” Speaker Johnson said at the signing. The new law is the capstone to the dramatic changes MAGA Republicans have made to the U.S. government in the last six months.

All without changing a single word of the Constitution! Can you imagine? You don’t have to now. I guess.

And now that the Supreme Court has decided it’s fine to gut the Commerce Clause, what the hell does the Constitution matter, anyway?

Why should we care about the Commerce Clause? Because it’s just as much a part of the Constitution as any other part of that document, including the Bill of Rights and all the amendments. Including the rights associated with creating art and inventions, aka, the copyright, trademark, and patent laws. And it’s become painfully obvious that the courts can’t even begin to keep up with the tech world. Or understand the overall effect all this has on every citizen.

BTW, without the Commerce Clause, the civil rights laws wouldn’t exist. Also, nationwide environmental protection wouldn’t exist. DDT would still be sprayed everywhere! Because DDT is good for me, right? 🙂

Okay, to sum it up, this bill changes everything. Now, instead of forcing the middle class to pay taxes, they’re forcing the middle class to pay all the taxes. And keeping billionaires and their toadies happy.

All that money wasted on stuff like environmental protection, infrastructure maintenance, and anything related to girly stuff like the arts and humanities, that’s going into supporting fossil fuel industries and coal mining. Yes, we’re returning to the glory days at the turn of the previous century. Smokestacks and robber barons! Everything old is new again, but we’re doing it faster and at scale with modern technology. Amazing!

And um …

Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce. In agriculture, food processing, and construction, they make up between 15% and 20% of the workforce.
Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea “owner responsibility.”
“[T]hey’re going to be largely responsible for these people,” Trump said. This echoes the system legislators set up in the U.S. South during Reconstruction thanks to the fact the Thirteenth Amendment permits enslavement “as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That system permitted employers to pay the fines of incarcerated individuals and then to own their labor until those debts were paid. While we know that system from the chain gangs of that era, in fact employers in many different sectors used—and abused—such workers.

Some interest groups might argue that the immigration crackdown came way too late.

PS: Speaking of “detention camps” and “slave labor,” here’s this:

Why Amazon Sucks Now & 8 Better Shopping Alternatives.

Thanks! I couldn’t agree more!

And OMG! Thank you so much for this! You do realize that takeaway is wishful thinking, though, right? I wonder what Amazon authors and other Amazon-funded creators would say.

Oh, yeah! 10 Reasons Not to Shop Amazon!

I’m so glad you people have finally come to realize that this company sucks.

Happy Fourth of July Weekend!

PPS: Saturday was spent in the studio, building a confessional! 🙂