The House Rules Committee Meeting on the GOP’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Totally Isn’t Shady at All

It is only natural when selling something that is as big and beautiful as the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ currently before the House of Representatives concerning the federal budget that you open the sale in the middle of the night. That is why Sotheby’s always opens its auctions at 3 a.m. local time. From CBS News:

The committee’s rare late-night meeting, scheduled for 1 a.m. [Wednesday morning], comes as Republican leadership races to pass what Mr. Trump refers to as the "big, beautiful bill" before their self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.

The vote to move the BBB out of the House Rules Committee was going to be its biggest hurdle prior to its eventual passage. A number of the BBB’s alleged Republican opponents are members of that body. Which means we have just had a weekend of sub rosa bargaining with the people who wanted the BBB to be harder on poor people, sick people, and sick poor people.

In a promising sign, Republican representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of the conservative holdouts who stalled the bill in the Budget Committee, said he would allow it to advance out of the Rules Committee.

Norman is a Mylar balloon of a legislator, so God alone knows what they had to promise to get his vote. Meanwhile, Speaker Moses has been hard at work getting water out of the rockheads in his caucus and carrying that water for the White House.

Mike Johnson has been meeting with the different factions in recent days to hear the demands and build a consensus around a modified version of the legislation that was produced by nearly a dozen House committees. Conservatives, who are upset that that bill does not make steep enough spending cuts to significantly bring down the deficit, have pushed for Medicaid work requirements to kick in much sooner than a 2029 deadline. They also want to eliminate all the clean energy subsidies that were implemented under the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by former President Joe Biden.

“It is unfortunately front-loaded in deficits and backloaded in savings, which I do not like,” Republican representative Chip Roy of Texas, another conservative holdout, said Monday. “None of my votes are guaranteed at this point.”

All of this most recent bargaining came after a previous round of concession helped the BBB get voted out of the House Budget Committee in the middle of the night on Sunday. Now, my old friend and Congressman Jim McGovern, ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, needed a nap on Tuesday afternoon to be sharp for whatever inhumane concessions have been made to the hardliners by Speaker Moses to get that result on top of whatever he’s given away to the Rules committee hardbars.

(Supposedly, some Republicans are upset at concessions regarding the phase-out of clean energy tax credits because they’re already working in their home districts.)

The way things are going, the Republicans are going to hold the final vote on this Big Beautiful Bill in a Motel 6 on the moon. Going, going ... gone.