The Big, Beautiful Republican Shrug

The Atlantic

24-05-2025

When Democrats reshaped the American health-insurance system in 2010, Republicans accused them of all manner of legislative foul play: Middle-of-the-night votes. Backroom deals. An enormous, partisan bill jammed through Congress before anyone could find out what was in it. 'Have you read the bill? Hell no you haven't!' an indignant then-House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered on the House floor.
The GOP's claims were exaggerated. But as Republicans rushed President Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' through the House this week, they committed just about every procedural misdeed they had ascribed to Democrats back then—and more. The final text of an 1,100-page bill that Speaker Mike Johnson described as 'the most consequential legislation that any party has ever passed' became public just hours before Republicans approved it on a party-line vote. They scheduled a pivotal hearing to begin at 1 a.m. and waived their own rules meant to give lawmakers at least three days to review legislation before a vote. One Republican even missed the climactic roll call because, the speaker explained, he fell asleep.
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'If something is beautiful, you don't do it after midnight,' a conservative critic of the bill, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, scolded in a speech delivered shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday.
To Democrats who chided them for their haste, Republicans replied with reminders of their own long-ago procedural end runs, as if to say, What goes around comes around. Hypocrisy abounds in both parties, and the path to passage for any major legislation is rarely smooth or pretty. But the GOP's aggressive drive to force through Trump's agenda fits a pattern that's emerged in each of his presidential terms: Rather than avoid the transgressions they've alleged Democrats have committed, Republicans have instead used them as license to go even further.
In 2017, the GOP confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court only after it eliminated the Senate filibuster for nominees to the high court. As justification, Republicans cited the Democrats' earlier move to scrap the Senate's 60-vote threshold for lower-court and executive-branch nominees—a change Republicans had denounced at the time.
Earlier this year, as Trump was trying to freeze congressionally authorized funding and shut down federal agencies without approval from lawmakers, I asked Republicans whether there was a line the president could not cross. They responded by talking not about Trump but about Joe Biden. 'Could the president do something totally unconstitutional, in violation of what Congress wants entirely?' Representative Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida asked, before quickly answering his own question: 'You mean, like student loans?'
As Díaz-Balart and other Republicans saw it, Biden had defied first Congress and then the Supreme Court in his push to unilaterally forgive billions of dollars in college debt beginning in 2022. Democrats did provide the GOP some fodder for that argument: Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had said categorically that the president could not wipe out student debt on his own. 'He does not have that power,' she told reporters in July 2021. 'That has to be an act of Congress.' Then, after the Supreme Court struck down Biden's $400 billion loan-cancellation program—while citing Pelosi's statement—Biden responded defiantly. 'The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt. But they didn't stop me,' he said. 'I'm going to keep going.'
Yet Biden also made clear that he would not defy the Court's ruling but instead would pursue more limited debt-relief plans in ways his administration believed were 'legally sound.' Now, instead of interpreting the Court's rebuke of Biden as a limit on executive authority, Republicans are claiming it as an excuse for Trump to expand presidential power even more.
In the House this week, some Republicans were willing to call out their own party for trying to rush such a far-reaching bill through the chamber. 'It's step on the gas and jam it through, because that's the way this place works,' Representative Chip Roy of Texas told reporters. 'It is a mistake.' Roy was one of the final conservative holdouts, but like most of his GOP colleagues, he ended up voting for the bill despite his misgivings about the process. 'And as with most major bills in Washington,' he acknowledged in a statement afterward, 'this bill was rushed, mashed together, and crammed through the House without sufficient time to review every item carefully. We should do better.'
As recently as December, conservatives forced GOP leaders to abandon a 1,547-page spending bill negotiated with Democrats, largely at the behest of Elon Musk, who was then the incoming head of DOGE. This time, no such rebellion materialized.
Johnson's Memorial Day deadline for passing Trump's plan through the House was largely arbitrary. Congress must raise the nation's debt limit by sometime this summer, and taxes for most Americans will go up if lawmakers don't extend the president's 2017 tax cuts by the end of the year. Conservatives had asked for another week or two to consider the bill, but Johnson and Trump succeeded in pressuring them to vote quickly so that the Senate could start working on it. Republicans want Trump to sign his second-term centerpiece, named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, into law by July 4, and leaders of both parties have learned that lawmakers rarely compromise without the forcing mechanism of a tight deadline.
'The voters want results. They don't want incessant debates,' House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told me, defending the speed with which Republicans advanced Trump's bill. 'We could debate this thing for months and months and not get any results for people who are struggling, and that's not going to help those families who gave us this mandate.'
Scalise was in his first full term in Congress when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. At the time, he joined Republicans in accusing them of rushing the bill through without sufficient transparency or debate. Yet Democrats spent many more months negotiating Obamacare than Republicans have spent on Trump's legislation. When I asked Scalise how he'd respond to critics who say the GOP is doing exactly what they criticized Democrats for, he pointed out the many committees that had held public hearings on the 'big, beautiful bill' in the past few weeks (the House held similar sessions in 2010) and blamed Democrats for trying to delay the measure. 'If Democrats want to drag it on and on and on, and then complain that it's going late at night, that's a little hypocritical,' Scalise said. (In fact, it was the GOP that scheduled a key hearing in the Rules Committee to begin in the wee hours of the morning.)
Other Republicans offered a different excuse: They were too young to remember the ACA fight. Just 27 members of the GOP conference were serving in the House at the time. 'I wasn't there. I ain't that old,' the 66-year-old Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona told me. He joined Congress in 2017 and was a state legislator in 2010. We were speaking on Tuesday, when the GOP bill was still in flux, and Biggs, a conservative, was still on the fence. 'I always tell the speaker, if I don't have time to read the bill, I'm probably a no,' Biggs said. Evidently, Biggs is a fast reader. When the House voted on the megabill less than 48 hours later—and about 10 hours after its final text was released—Biggs was a yes.