House GOP leaders and the White House are pushing for a final passage vote today on a roughly 1,100-page bill that hasn’t even been fully written — and one Republican lawmaker is taking notice in a very public way.
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, fresh from being called out by President Donald Trump the day before as a “grandstander” who doesn’t “understand government,” is using his social media platform to call attention to the path down which Republicans are headed.
“Major provisions of the big beautiful bill are still being negotiated and written, yet we are being told we will vote on it today,” Massie said in one X post on Wednesday. “Shouldn’t we take more than a few hours to read a bill this big and this consequential?”
In a follow-up, Massie noted, “it’s in our rules that we will have 72 [hours] to read every bill. Yet it’s been circumvented this week by a ‘manager’s amendment’ which substantially changes the bill but should only contain technical clarifications.”
That manager’s amendment would reflect the major policy changes leaders are currently discussing with conservative hard-liners. It would replace the base text of the GOP megabill that is currently being debated in the House Rules Committee, which needs to take a vote to pave the way for floor consideration of the party-line domestic policy package.
Leadership wanted to pass that bill before the end of the day. But the Rules panel has been meeting since 1 a.m. on Wednesday and shows no sign of concluding anytime soon. Speaker Mike Johnson and members of the House Freedom Caucus are also heading to the White House to meet with Trump on the megabill later this afternoon to try to break the impasse over the scale of spending cuts on the table.
In another X post, Massie applied his own captions to a popular meme — a photo of one man noticing a woman walking down the street, while another woman looks on horrified. In Massie’s version, the woman being admired is labeled “one big beautiful bill,” the man is tagged as “MAGA” and the other woman has the description, “no more omnibus bills.”
The Republican domestic policy package is not technically an omnibus, which refers to a piece of legislation that bundles together multiple appropriations bills. But fiscal hawks, including Massie, have raged over the megabill’s price tag, complaining that it doesn’t do enough to cut spending.
Katherine Tully-McManus and Benjamin Guggenheim contributed to this report.