Trump’s monstrous bill will pass today

In case you missed it, the Principled Opposition From the Last True Conservatives collapsed overnight via the usual inducements:

Representative Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, who initially defied party leadership on the bill but backed down along with a group of other holdouts, said on social media that he would vote to approve its final passage.

Clyde said his objection had been over the Senate’s removal of a provision that would have eased regulations on firearms suppressors, or silencers. House leaders had included it to win his support, but it was struck by the Senate parliamentarian under procedural rules.

Clyde said he spoke with President Trump about the issue and expected to work with the administration on it. In the meantime, he said, he would vote to pass the bill to advance Trump’s agenda.

A number of Republican holdouts have said over the past 24 hours that Trump and members of his administration had offered up executive orders or other actions to address concerns they raised about the bill. It is not clear what commitments were made or what may come to fruition, but lawmakers were likely to cite them to justify flipping their positions and voting yes.

One thing that’s hard to keep in focus is that the non-overtly authoritarian/trending toward outright fascism version of the Republican party that existed before 2015 is, from a pure policy perspective, an incredibly horrible entity, since it’s central focus was and is to slash an already wildly inadequate social safety net for the express purpose of distributing wealth upwards, while at the same time exploding the deficit.

The Hurray For Concentration Camps version of the party is obviously much worse, but it was already terrible before Trump made it exponentially more terrible again.