Senate Republicans throw the world's shittiest slumber party to pass their massive "Fuck you" of a tax bill
It’s a feeling that every parent who’s ever woken up above the aftermath of a particularly disastrous slumber party knows: The sense that, while you were sleeping, some truly chaotic shit went down. Maybe someone guzzled an entire two-liter of Crush and painted your guest bathroom orange with the resultant torrent of pizza-filled spew. Maybe one of the kids got so pissed off about continually losing at Street Fighter that he decided to walk home in the middle of the night, angrily dodging cars like a pissed-off adolescent Frogger. Or maybe the kids decided to get really creative with their disastrous night-time shenanigans, and got together and passed a massive tax cut primarily focused on providing relief to their richest donors, at the expense of the poor, at 2 in the god-damn morning. Kids, right?
The parents of America woke up this morning to the sensation that those wacky kids in the Senate had really gotten off the chain last night, when 51 Republicans got together in the wee hours of the morning and voted yes on the Tax Cuts And Job Act Of 2017, a sweeping, scribbled-over mess of a document whose final, 479-page draft arrived on senators’ desks just hours before the final vote. Contrary to its name, the bill wasn’t merely focused on rejiggering the tax code in favor of the 1 percent, though; it also touches on abortion rights, healthcare, oil drilling, and the separation of church and state, among any number of other conservative-friendly topics. (Presumably, its drafters thought “The Big Grab-Bag Of All The Shit The G.O.P. Thinks It Can Get Away With Today” was too wordy of a title.)
A number of Democratic senators begged their right-leaning colleagues to delay last night’s vote in order to give them time to actually read the damn thing. But that would have wrecked the evening’s timetable—a game of Never Have I Ever (Actually Cared About My Constituents) at 3 a.m., an attempt to summon Bloody Ronnie in the Senate bathroom at 4—and so was respectfully turned down.
Public responses to this legislative late-night session of Truth(?) Or Dare have been unsurprisingly creative, as people express their frustration with their elected leaders—it’s been a good day for anybody who owns the copyright on a snazzy, Twitter-friendly picture of a guillotine—and post reminders that there are still several steps people can rally against before some version of this thing becomes a law.