Republicans Admit They Didn’t Even Read Their Big Beautiful Bill

MTG got a little behind in her reading. Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

For years, Republicans, particularly on the conservative wing of the party, have complained bitterly about the congressional habit of packaging huge amounts of consequential legislation into giant “omnibus” bills hiding controversial provisions that members don’t have much of an opportunity to object to or even read. Demands for “a return to regular order,” a staple of tea-party-era conservative Republican rhetoric, meant ending the practice of Democratic and Republican congressional leaders cutting thousands of deals behind closed doors and then presenting members with no option but an up-or-down vote with terrible repercussions (e.g., a government shutdown) in the event of failure.

But the progress of Trump’s intensely partisan Big Beautiful Bill through Congress this year shows you don’t need Democrats to commit egregious sins against “regular order.” To be clear, budget-reconciliation bills are by design large, unwieldy packages put together on the fly to steamroll legislation past an opposition party that can’t stop it with a Senate filibuster. And with the House as closely divided as it is right now, it’s inevitable that deals had to be made at the very last minute to secure the BBB’s passage by one vote. But it’s remarkable that House Republicans are beginning to publicly admit they’d didn’t read the damn thing and wouldn’t have voted for it if they had understood its contents, as the New York Times reports:

Last week, Representative Mike Flood of Nebraska admitted during a town hall meeting in his district that he did not know that the bill would limit judges’ power to hold people in contempt for violating court orders. He would not have voted for the measure, he said, if he had realized.

And as lawmakers returned to Washington on Tuesday after their weeklong break, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said that she had been unaware that the mega-bill she voted for would block states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade.

“Full transparency, I did not know about this section,” Ms. Greene posted on social media, calling it a violation of states’ rights and adding that she “would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”

What’s really going on here is that Flood and Greene are seeking to regain the leverage they exhausted in voting for the BBB by threatening to vote against the ultimate bill that comes back from the Senate and is negotiated by House and Senate leaders. This could get them into the last-minute, behind-closed-doors discussions and dealmaking down the road. But at the same time, they’re giving Democrats valuable ammunition in their argument that the BBB is so shameful that it has to be built like Frankenstein’s monster in the dark and out of sight.

MTG’s “I didn’t read the bill” confession is also interesting insofar as she has always advertised herself as the ultimate Trump loyalist. No one would be surprised if she told us she wears her MAGA hat to sleep every night. Yet there’s no question that Trump himself demanded that House Republicans put aside all their silly quibbles about “policy” and “arithmetic” and vote for the BBB strictly on his word that it would Make America Great Again. So who needs to read the bill? Trump certainly didn’t. He has Stephen Miller and Russell Vought to do that for him.