(A News and Sentinel Op-Ed - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Maya Angelou

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If only majorities of voting West Virginians had taken Ms. Angelou’s advice prior to 2024 when it comes to the Republican Party. Had they refused to send Shelley Moore Capito, Jim Justice, Riley Moore, and Carol Miller to Congress or back to Congress, the American people wouldn’t have the anvil of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” tied around our ankles pulling us to the depths.

The passage of this legislation is nothing short of catastrophic on so many fronts. For starters, between 16 million and 17 million people stand to lose their health coverage with over $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. These cuts, of course, will be delayed until after the 2026 midterm elections because Republicans knew they needed to backload them to try to spare themselves the electoral consequences of their sadism.

Rural hospitals like Minnie Hamilton in Calhoun County, W.Va., will face insolvency and probably closure thanks to this bill. I caught the mind-numbingly stupid interview on CNN with West Virginia State Attorney General JB McCuskey the other day, wherein McCuskey tried to claim that all this public backlash to the bill has just been hyperbole and that rural healthcare systems will just need to adjust their revenue streams. How does the AG figure they’ll manage that? I can tell him: they’ll have to charge private insurance companies a lot more — costs that will be passed down in the form of higher premiums and out-of-pocket expenses (e.g. copays, coinsurances, deductibles, and higher out-of-pocket annual maximums).

Tens of millions also stand to lose part or all of their food security in the form of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits cuts. The average SNAP benefit comes to about $6 per person, per day, according to USDA Food and Nutrition Service data. To hear Republicans tell it, though, SNAP recipients are just moochers draining federal coffers. Never mind that the FY26 Pentagon budget is set to exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history at the same time as the DOD has failed seven straight audits and can’t provide an accounting for over 60% of its assets. Israel needs additional weaponry and munitions to keep killing starving people waiting for food aid in Gaza more than many SNAP recipients need their $6 a day, apparently.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA), CHIPS Act, and American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) (while all could have and should have gone further and done more) still invested historic amounts in American manufacturing and domestic jobs growth with a focus on union jobs, as well as in renewable energies and energy efficiencies. The benefits of these laws went disproportionately to smaller, more rural, Republican-led states. With their “big, beautiful bill” Republicans have now done the unthinkable (to the rational) and begun to dismantle those gains for their own constituents in favor of massively polluting, climate-destabilizing, deadly, and far more expensive fossil fuels.

The GOP tries to reassure people with talk of pseudo-solutions like carbon capture and storage or sequestration or blue hydrogen, while spouting off endlessly about AI, cloud computing, and all the data centers the world needs that they feel have just got to be powered by coal, oil, and gas. What they’re missing (more like deliberately ignoring) is the enormous water and power demands of data centers, on top of the potable water being made irrevocably unusable and toxic by the fossil fuels industries and power demands our grids already struggle to meet in this new world of weather extremes.

West Virginia in particular is set to be absolutely devastated by this bill they call beautiful. Don’t believe me? Ask ChatGPT sometime. Brace yourself for its response. But our congressional delegation doesn’t care. While parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee would be mud-covered cholera zones by now if they didn’t have each other and more than 100 people are missing or dead after the Guadalupe River in Texas swept away a Christian youth camp, our “representatives” are more concerned about where they can get their “Alligator Alcatraz” merch to show their support for how quickly a concentration camp was built on the Everglades in Florida.

Maybe I’ve been too negative in this piece. Never fear, you can still get a bottle of Trump’s new “Victory 45-47” Eau de Parfum for women for just $249 and Trump’s announced plans to host MMA fights at the White House. Premium parking for the fights and festivities will be available where the Rose Garden used to be.

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Eric Engle is a resident of Parkersburg.