As House Republicans raced to advance their domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — GOP leaders completed the legislative work in the most irresponsible ways possible. House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team wrote and rewrote their not-so-beautiful bill in the middle of the night, and changed the reconciliation package repeatedly in response to private backroom deals, far from public view.
Republican leaders, quite deliberately, rushed the bill onto the floor for a vote before members could read it, likely realizing that more sunlight would mean more defections. The plan worked, and the proposal passed the chamber by one vote.
But in the days that followed, some members who helped advance the legislation started to learn what was in the bill they’d already voted for; they started admitting that they hadn’t read it; and they started raising new objections.
Last week, for example, Republican Rep. Mike Flood held a town hall meeting with constituents in his Nebraska district, where he faced questions about a provision in the bill that would effectively prevent judges from holding litigants who defy court orders in contempt — a move that appeared designed to protect Donald Trump and his White House team. Flood agreed that this policy was misguided, while grudgingly conceding that he didn’t know it was in the bill he voted for.
This week, one of his right-wing colleagues joined the same club. The Washington Post reported:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a vocal ally of President Donald Trump, admitted Tuesday she was unaware of a key provision in his priority legislative package when she voted for it last month. Greene wrote on X that she would not have backed the legislation had she known it would block states from passing laws to regulate artificial intelligence for 10 years. She called on the Senate to remove the provision.
The Georgia Republican’s social media post added that she was making the admission about her ignorance in the interest of “full transparency.”
As a matter of political principle, acknowledgements like these reflect an important breakdown in governance. When party leaders try to rush legislation onto the floor, telling their members to vote for it while effectively blindfolded, it’s incumbent on lawmakers to use their leverage, slow the process down, and tell their party that they won’t vote for important bills without knowing what’s in them.
Flood, Greene and others who’ve been less candid about their lack of due diligence failed the most basic of legislative tests.
But as a political matter, these admissions pose a new challenge for the House speaker’s office: The party’s megabill, assuming some version of it passes the Senate, will return to the lower chamber for another vote. Before that happens, at least some members will now likely take a closer look at the package — making final passage even more difficult the second time than the first.
In 2010, as House Democrats prepared to pass the Affordable Care Act, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a speech, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” The right twisted the comments to make it seem as if she was referring to members of Congress, but the California Democrat was obviously talking about the public: Pelosi believed that Americans would appreciate the benefits from the ACA once they learned more about its actual provisions.
Pelosi, we now know, was ultimately proven right. But 15 years later, we’re seeing a related dynamic that reflects the GOP’s twisted version of the Pelosi quote: This time, it’s Republican leaders who really do want to pass their bill before their own members “find out what is in it.”
With each passing day, it appears that effort isn’t going well.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
