What Mike Crapo Did
The Senate Finance Committee chair is the real architect of Trump's Big Bill
Not one in a thousand Americans could pick Senator Mike Crapo out of a line up, yet he’s the most consequential senator most folks have never heard of.
He’s now created his legacy. And the rest of us are going to live with it for a long, long time.
You’re here because you care about history and politics. I’m here to draw on decades of writing about history and politics, particularly by applying history to our current circumstances. These essays are free, but a financial contribution helps support my writing and research, including a new book in progress.
Subscribe to Marc’s Substack for $8 a month or make a pledge.
Many thanks.
Mike Crapo is a genuinely unassuming guy, at least as career politicians go. He is rarely - almost never - on cable TV or the Sunday shows. He rarely grants an interview to a home state journalist. His town halls don’t exist. The last one was in 2019.
Until recently when Crapo played, I would argue, the pivotal Senate role in putting into law Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda - admittedly that gives Trump a lot of credit for actually having a domestic policy agenda - the senator’s most memorable public act involved a never fully explained Virginia DUI in 2012.
That DUI remains a difficult to process footnote for the Idaho Republican who everyone who knew him saw as an ultra conservative Mormon straight arrow. 1
Now Crapo, who I have known since his days as an Idaho state senator, has another and much more important footnote. He’s the guy who really deserves credit - or blame - for much of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Here’s what I wrote this week for the Lewiston, Idaho Tribune:
Donald Trump is claiming his victory. His One Big Beautiful Bill passed, reshaping the country in ways he doesn’t understand but we will – soon. 2
The legislation, passed entirely with Republican votes, is the largest wealth transfer from poor to wealthy Americans in the history. It shreds the social safety net that millions of fellow Americans depend upon for health care and food security. Donald Trump promised over and over that he would not touch Medicaid. His bill touches Medicaid with a flaming sledgehammer.
Yet, victory lap notwithstanding, this really wasn’t Trump’s legislation. He is infamously hands off on details, particularly details like complicated tax policy. No, this legislation is really the handiwork of the senior senator from Idaho, Mike Crapo, the chairman of the Finance Committee, the committee overseeing your taxes, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and tariff policy. 3
A serious argument can be made that no previous federal legislator from Idaho has ever had such a big thumb on the scale of American domestic policy. The legislation will be Crapo’s legacy after 30 years in Congress, and you sense he knows it.
Crapo stood at Trump’s elbow for the bill signing at the White House looking frankly a bit uncomfortable, perhaps starting to wonder what he’ll say when rural hospitals, already financially stressed, start to close. 4
One recent analysis found nearly 800 rural hospitals in the United States “at risk of closure due to financial problems, with about 40% of those hospitals at immediate risk of closure.” Nine of those hospitals are in Idaho.
Another analysis based on the financial position of individual hospitals shows three Idaho hospitals – American Falls, Jerome and Burley – as most likely to go under. The reason, of course, is that rural hospitals rely overwhelmingly on Medicaid dollars Crapo slashed in his bill.
During the run up to Trump’s signing ceremony Crapo said virtually nothing about cuts to Medicaid (or food assistance) other than to claim the legislation will root out “waste, fraud and abuse.” How much waste, fraud and abuse do you suspect exists at the community-owned Power County Hospital in American Falls, Idaho?
Mike Crapo surely knows that voters in Power County voted to tax themselves in 2017 to make improvements to their hospital. One suspects they didn’t do so because they believed the place was rotten with fraud.
Crapo’s main argument for his bill is that it makes permanent tax cuts enacted the same year Power County voters approved $15 million in property taxes to improve their hospital. Like other Republicans who voted for the legislation, Crapo has argued that the tax cuts will stimulate the economy without adding to the ballooning federal deficit. No serious economist agrees with this assessment.
As a reader pointed out recently: if permanent tax cuts don’t add to the deficit why did Crapo vote to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion? It’s impossible to escape the fact that Crapo spent years gaslighting constituents regarding concerns about deficit spending.
Tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans do indeed add to the deficit.
And not just income tax rates, but pages of special interest tax benefits that Crapo inserted or allowed to be insert in his legislation.
As Politico reported:
There’s a new supersized deduction for business meals – though only for employees at certain Alaskan fishing boats and processing plants, with the measure stipulating the facilities must be ‘located in the United States north of 50 degrees north latitude’ though not in a ‘metropolitan statistical area.’
That was the Lisa Murkowski buy off.
There’s more:
A $17 billion expansion of a provision that helps venture capitalists make fortunes tax-free.
An Oklahoma senator got a sweet deal for the oil and gas industry.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana championed a $2 billion giveaway for the rum industry. “We have the highest per capita intake of alcohol in the nation,” Cassidy said. I guess you could call that taking care of the folks back home.
There is an expansion of a “little-known break that Silicon Valley investors have used to nix tax bills on tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings from Internet startups.”
And $26 billion for a new tax credits for gifts to groups that provide scholarships for private school students.
A cool $1 billion, tax exempt, for “spaceports,” which the legislation says are “any facility located at or in close proximity to a launch site or reentry site.”
Oregon’s Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on Crapo’s committee, said in a social media post that this tax break was “Trump’s [or Crapo’s] wedding gift to [Jeff] Bezos and birthday gift to [Elon] Musk … tucked in the new budget bill.”
While cutting Medicaid by $1 trillion over ten years, Crapo’s bill found billions for a 150 percent increase in homeland security spending and billions more for a border wall even as the Trump Administration boasts it has closed the border. Wall bucks, cuts for wellness.
So, what to make of Crapo’s legacy bill? He’s a smart guy, a Harvard trained lawyer. Surely he knows what his bill will do. Surely he know how wildly unpopular it is.
Surely he has an answer for former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers who says the legislation is a victory for “human brutality.”
Surely Crapo knows, as the National Catholic Reporter put it in an editorial: “This bill is the signature of a democracy in decay. A government that no longer reflects the will or welfare of its people. A political system where a party can seize the presidency with less than half of the popular vote and still impose an agenda that serves only the wealthiest.”
What a legacy.
A final thought on the senator from Idaho.
Your memory may go back far enough to remember the release of the Access Hollywood tape very late in the 2016 presidential campaign. The tape featured Donald Trump boasting about his sexual conquests and his admitted abuse of women. Trump said, among other things, as “a star” he could get away grabbing women by, well, you know.
For many at the time, including Senator Crapo, the tape seemed likely to end Trump’s campaign and Crapo publicly called on Trump to do just that.
Here’s Crapo’s full statement from October 2016:
I have reached a decision that I can no longer endorse Donald Trump. This is not a decision that I have reached lightly, but his pattern of behavior has left me no choice. His repeated actions and comments toward women have been disrespectful, profane and demeaning. I have spent more than two decades working on domestic violence prevention. Trump’s most recent excuse of ‘locker room talk’ is completely unacceptable and is inconsistent with protecting women from abusive, disparaging treatment.
Make no mistake - we [need] conservative leadership in the White House. I urge Donald Trump to step aside and allow the Republican party to put forward a conservative candidate like Mike Pence who can defeat Hillary Clinton.
Crapo is far from alone, of course, in completely flipping on that strong statement, as he did three weeks after he issued it.
Politico noted at the time:
For Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the third time’s the charm for his presidential endorsement.
He backed Donald Trump once he became the presumptive Republican nominee in May. But Crapo then revoked his endorsement earlier this month, citing Trump’s offensive comments — caught on tape — boasting of sexually assaulting women.
You might say Crapo was for Trump then against Trump and then for him again. He made his peace, apparently. These days Crapo has nothing but praise.
Crapo was correct in 2016 when he said he had been working to address domestic violence against women, but not so much since. His focus seems to have changed to preventing transgender women from participating in sports.
Perhaps this is just in keeping with the arc of the moral universe of MAGA. What once was considered “disrespectful, profane and demeaning” is now abject Republican acceptance of a president with 34 felony convictions related to paying hush money to a porn star.
Still, you have to wonder: how does a Mike Crapo square this circle?
Are billionaire tax cuts and ending health care for millions of Americans, including his own constituents, worth the unblinking embrace of the politics of Trumpism?
Is continuing a 30 year career in Congress worth debasing yourself by embracing an authoritarian who clearly relishes dominating weak men like Mike Crapo?
The answer is certainly - sure. It is clearly worth it to these folks.
I understand the power and the prospect of another re-election - Crapo is 74 - and the bloated, fawning congressional staff and all that, but in the quiet of his own heart you have to wonder if Mike Crapo knows what an awful bargain he has made and what a lie he is living.
Surely he knows.
The McClatchy DC bureau’s report said: Crapo paid a $250 fine and had his driver’s license suspended for a year after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor first-offense drunken driving charge on Jan. 4, 2013. “I know that I must learn from this mistake. That is what I have tried to do,” Crapo said. “I have apologized, and do again. I have fully faced and fulfilled my obligations to the law.”
Writing in The Bulwark, Joe Perticone highlighted one provision in Crapo’s bill that apparently most senators didn’t know about when they voted - a limit on what professional gamblers can deduct in losses. “Several Republican senators have now admitted to not knowing that the reduced gambling deduction was even in the bill they voted to pass. And, frankly, it makes sense. The committee of jurisdiction (Finance) didn’t bother to have a markup of the bill. In fact, no Senate committee did.”
It’s essentially been ignored in the reporting about the legislation that Crapo’s Finance Committee never actually considered the bill, as Senate procedure traditionally requires. The work was done in small groups by a handful of senators behind closed doors.
The Trump on-again, off-again tariff mumbo jumbo is one issue the Senate Finance Committee (and Mike Crapo) could impact if they chose to do so. The Constitution vests tariff authority with Congress. That Crapo and other Republicans won’t even discuss that Trump lacks the legal authority to do what he is trying to do with tariffs is a stark testimony to congressional abdication to the chaos man in the White House.
A rural hospital in Curtis, Nebraska has already announced its closing, as Nebraska Public Media reported: “Unfortunately, the current financial environment, driven by anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid, has made it impossible for us to continue operating all of our services, many of which have faced significant financial challenges for years,” Troy Bruntz, President and CEO of Community Hospital, said in a news release.
The 30-year old hospital is in Frontier County, Nebraska where voters in 2024 overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump.
One does wonder. As you say, Mike was an entirely different guy back when he was the Idaho Senate Pro Tempore -- he even had a modest sense of humor and seemed thoughtful and sincere. He's lived in Washington now for more than 30 years, mostly by himself (his wife chose not to move the family when Crapo was first elected to the House). He's the most perplexing of the Idaho MAGA converts (though Mike Simpson is coming up on the outside). He's become increasingly insular, relying on staff for nearly all communication and outreach. We know that Washington changes people, and never for the better. Mike Crapo is Exhibit 1.
I've watched Crapo for 30 years. He cares little for Idaho and Idahoans, is a conniving liar, and has a coward's lust for power. He has hurt his constituents, but just doesn't care. As long as gullible Idaho voters will keep him in DC, he'll stay.