Unfortunately, the acoustics in the room were terrible. I went ahead and posted the video anyway to show the level of venting from the audience.
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I went to the Crenshaw town hall hoping that he would answer some specific questions. Instead, he used a technique that the audience was not prepared for, especially one that displayed much more civility in these dire times than audiences around the country.
Crenshaw entered the room and made it clear that he could not stay long, as he had to jump on a plane back to Washington, which was clearly an excuse to avoid accountability. He proceeded not to take questions but to launch into a lengthy soliloquy about his supposed accomplishments. It was evident that he expected a low-information audience, something he did not receive this time.
He claimed the Medicaid cuts were not really cuts but savings from mitigating fraud. He continued the GOP trope about abled-bodied people taking advantage of Medicaid, which is patently false. He took credit for Texas not accepting the Medicaid Expansion for the Affordable Care Act. When the audience made it clear that doing that kills Texans, he threw the Texas Legislature under the bus, stating that it was not a federal issue but a state issue.
He attempted to justify the bill’s attack on clean energy by implying that clean energy was unreliable, while fracking and exporting LNG were beneficial to the environment.
When asked about raising the cap on Social Security taxes, he launched into another lengthy soliloquy, arguing that it would be a disservice to young people and that Social Security was never intended to be a replacement for other retirement income.
When asked why not give tax cuts to the middle class and raise taxes on the wealthy, he said, paraphrased, it is not in his DNA to raise taxes, period. He also claimed the bill was not a windfall for the rich.
If allowed to ask, here are the questions I would have asked him to refute his lying and misleading report (soliloquy).
Many able-bodied people are caring for the chronically ill, many poor people live in certain rural and urban areas because of cost, and others would be unable to fulfill the work requirements. Isn’t that a draconian way to strip people of Medicaid and sentence them to death?
You said the bill was not a giveaway to the rich and said we could not find such an example. The fact that a wealthy person can write off a $70 million jet immediately is one. But the list is vast.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is packed with provisions that disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations, while offering middle-class taxpayers little or no access to those same advantages. Some of the most glaring examples include:
Estate and Gift Tax Exemptions: The bill extends and enhances the increased estate and gift tax exemption amounts. This means wealthy families can pass on far larger fortunes tax-free. Middle-class families rarely have estates anywhere near the taxable threshold, so they gain nothing from this giveaway.
Qualified Residence Interest Deduction: The extension and modification of the mortgage interest deduction for qualified residences remain most useful for owners of expensive homes with large mortgages. Middle-class families, many of whom rent or have modest mortgages, receive little benefit.
Business Deductions and Expensing: The bill locks in full expensing for specific business property, domestic research, and significant depreciable assets. These provisions overwhelmingly benefit corporations and wealthy investors who own businesses. Ordinary wage earners cannot claim such write-offs.
International Tax Loopholes: It modifies deductions for foreign-derived intangible income (FDII) and income from controlled foreign corporations (CFCs). Only multinational corporations and their wealthy shareholders gain from these carve-outs, not middle-class households.
SALT Deduction Relief Tilted to the Rich: The bill temporarily raises the cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions from $10,000 to $40,000 for high earners, before phasing it back down. This benefits upper-income households in high-tax states almost exclusively; middle-class taxpayers rarely itemize or reach the SALT cap.
Bottom Line: While the bill sprinkles in symbolic middle-class relief—like no tax on tips or overtime—it locks in structural tax shelters for the wealthy: larger estate tax loopholes, luxury mortgage deductions, corporate expensing, and international profit-shifting rules. These are provisions that the middle class cannot realistically access, ensuring that the wealthiest households see the biggest windfalls.
The bill all but disinvests in climate and clean energy investments, including clean heavy-duty vehicle funding, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Diesel emission reduction programs, and Methane emissions mitigation programs for oil and gas producers. Why are you ceding the clean energy revolution to China as America sticks with dirty energy?
Groundwater, farmland, and grazing land in West Texas are being polluted due to the spontaneous failure of pressure wells resulting from hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking. Yet, you are lengthening the time for us to get off of fossil fuels economically by reclassifying coal and providing deceptive “Clean Fuel Production Credit Adjustments.” Why are you willing to leave our kids a wasteland?
There are so many more questions to ask that show the irresponsibility, lying, and misleading by Dan Crenshaw and the Republican Party. This post is but a fraction of the questions and statements that need to be answered and made for this chronically evil bill that will close hospitals, starve children, and destroy our environment. Ironically, it will affect the core constituency of the Republican Party more than any other group. Dan Crenshaw’s town hall failed to make a case for keeping this person in office.
