It’s hard to miss the buzz about the Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Not so long ago, we heard about financial institutions that were too big to fail. Now, it seems, we’re looking at a bill that’s too big to succeed. If only there were a line-item veto process! For some fine analysis, I suggest consulting the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: Letter to Congress Regarding One Big Beautiful Bill Act, issued on May 20, 2025 (linked below).

Here are some key particulars. On the positive side, the bill goes a long way toward ending government funding of Planned Parenthood. On the negative side, in its current form, the bill cuts Medicaid by $625B and SNAP by $267B. At the same time, it adds $70B to migration enforcement and detention, as well as boosting the military budget by $150B. The strategy for funding all this is to increase taxes for lower income people while reducing them for the wealthy. Of course, I’m delighted that the bill helps defund Planned Parenthood. But I’m dismayed by the bill’s formidable negatives.

So, what to do? Suppose I were a legislator with a duty to vote on the bill and represent my constituents. Well, I’m not, but I’m a constituent with a responsibility to make my voice heard. It won’t do, will it, to shrug my shoulders and go play pickle ball?

The conventional wisdom says I should balance the pros and cons and thus form a considered judgment. This balancing metaphor is suspect. Too often it suggests a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. But in evaluating this bill, some of the goods that come into play are incommensurable and nonfungible. Life and health, the family and its nurturing, are basic goods of human flourishing.

It would be convenient, no doubt, if we could put the particulars of the bill on a grand political scale and let it do our thinking for us. Well, we can’t. When we in fact weigh things, they turn out to be physical objects. (Some of which “weigh in” at more than we’d hoped.) They are not, clearly not, the core values of the human enterprise.

What we can do, however, is to reflect carefully on what we intend to achieve when we come to terms with an “omnibus bill.” And to reflect carefully we need to understand a sobering truth: to intend the end of an action entails intending the means to realize that end.

Suppose, then, that a lawmaker votes with the purpose of reducing taxes for the affluent and the means for doing so amounts to undermining the health and stability of low-income families. Then that lawmaker is acting as if his or her end somehow justifies a wrongful means. It equally follows that if, as a constituent, I support that lawmaker, then I am complicit in a wrongful act. Not only does such a vote, or my support for it, mean that something bad will happen, it says that something bad is itself the very means of, say, lowering taxes for the affluent. It’s reducing taxes on the backs of the poor.

St. John Paul II in his encyclical The Splendor of Truth (Veritatis Splendor) distinguishes between the “ulterior intentions” of one’s action and the “object” or “proximate end” of one’s action. The reason, he explains, is that “a good intention is not itself sufficient, but a correct choice of actions is also needed, is that the human act depends on its object, whether that object is capable or not of being ordered to God.” What we don’t need, gentle reader, is a magical scale that doesn’t exist. What we do need is honest reflection on the structure of ethical action. This reflection brings us to the voice of conscience. As St. John Henry Newman puts it, conscience is both our best exercise of practical reasoning and God’s own vicar.

[A link to the USCCB letter to Congress is here.]