What do you know about President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”?

I’ve written about it extensively over the last several months, so hopefully you’ve seen some of that. The short answer is that it is “reconciliation” bill that is designed to avoid the Senate filibuster. This allows the Republicans to pursue much of their legislative agenda without the need to make any compromises with or concessions to the Democrats. The fascist regime’s priorities on immigration, taxes and energy are dependent on passage of this bill, which would make failure hugely consequential.

The goal is the for the House to pass their version of the bill before Memorial Day, which comes on May 26, this year. At that point, the Senate will take up the legislation with the goal of creating one bill that can pass both the House and Senate by July 4. It’s an aggressive schedule but there are costs to delay. For one, the Republicans want to avoid seeing Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire, which will happen if they aren’t extended by the end of the year.

But the schedule is already slipping. There are three committees in the House that are tasked with finding most of the cost-savings needed to at least somewhat offset the price of a tax cut extension and Trump’s spending priorities. The Ways & Means Committee deals with the tax policy, while the Energy & Commerce committee handles Medicare and Medicaid, and the Agriculture Committee is responsible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or food stamps) program.

All three of these committees have delayed their scheduled hearings next week for marking up their portion of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Energy and Commerce was set to markup the bill next week. Ways and Means had not yet set a date but was expected to hold the hearing next week, along with the rest of the committees that did not hold markups this week, to line up with leadership’s desired timeline. The two committees are responsible for two of the thorniest provisions of the budget bill: Medicaid spending and tax cuts, respectively.

The Agriculture Committee joined in the delay on Thursday after congressional leaders met at the White House and were unable to arrive at compromises that can unite the House Republican caucus. The root of the problem is that there is a huge divide between right-wing Freedom Caucus types who want massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and those who see clear political peril in that agenda. The simplest way of understanding this is that, under the directive of the reconciliation bill’s binding instructions, the Agriculture Committee must find $230 billion in savings over the next decade, while the Energy & Commerce Committee must find a whopping $880 billion. There’s no way to reach those numbers without attacking Medicaid and SNAP.

As for the Ways & Means Committee, among other difficulties, it cannot find consensus between supporters and opponents of the State and Local Tax Exemption (SALT) that mainly pits representatives from New York, New Jersey and California against everyone else.

House Republicans came away empty-handed Wednesday afternoon from a high-stakes meeting aimed at ending a yearslong standoff within their caucus over a $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions.

The meeting between Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican lawmakers pushing to raise the deduction was intended to clear a big obstacle in GOP negotiations over President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” domestic policy bill. But after meeting for nearly an hour, lawmakers said they were unable to resolve their differences over how much to loosen the cap.

While the House Judiciary Committee successfully advanced their portion of the bill which deals mainly with immigration issues, the failure of these other committees to come up with a plan threatens to blow the Memorial Day target. That, in turn, would risk a failure to win final passage before July 4, and the summer recess.

It’s hard to say which issue is likely to be the most intractable, but I suspect it’s Medicaid. And it really comes down to that $880 billion price tag. The Republicans can find consensus on some things, like introducing a work requirement for able-bodied recipients of Medicaid and doing more to make sure non-citizens don’t receive any aid. But these changes will not make a dent in their cost savings requirement.

To find the money they need, they’re going to have to make changes that will inevitably throw tens of millions off their health care plans, and this is something Trump does not want to do.

President Donald Trump is deeply skeptical of the emerging House Republican plan to make deep cuts to Medicaid to pay for the GOP’s megabill. And Speaker Mike Johnson is running out of time to convince him.

The first problem is that this ship already sailed when the House and Senate passed their budget reconciliation plan that forces Energy & Commerce to find nearly a trillion in spending cuts. The second problem is that the Republicans have polled this.

GOP senators, meanwhile, were briefed Wednesday on polling and options for Medicaid changes, including new work requirements, during their closed-door lunch by Foundation for Government Accountability’s Tarren Bragdon. Sen. Josh Hawley issued a warning afterward, saying benefit cuts would be “catastrophically unwise.”

It’s typical of Trump to only realize that the path he’s on is “catastrophically unwise” when it’s too late to do anything about it. About the best he can hope for now is to pursue a reduction in how much the federal government reimburses the states for Medicaid spending under the Affordable Care Act. This won’t prevent tens of millions of people from potentially losing their health coverage or seeing state tax hikes and slashes in education and other spending. But it will at least allow him to pretend this is the fault of governors rather than his administration. The White House has reportedly agreed to look at this course, and really there are no realistic alternatives.

That doesn’t mean that the Republicans can be united around the proposal, and they need near-unanimity because of their narrow margin in the House and the hopelessness of finding any bipartisan support.

There are plenty of other problems the Republicans are having, too, including the aforementioned SALT discussions.

Elsewhere, House Republicans are being hammered on multiple other fronts as their megabill dreams come crashing into political reality. Johnson failed Wednesday to resolve his standoff with vulnerable Republicans over raising the cap on state and local tax deductions, even as he expects Ways and Means to take up its draft of the GOP tax plan next week.

Key GOP lawmakers also yanked controversial provisions around car fees and antitrust enforcement from their Wednesday markups. And GOP Rep. Mike Turner is warning that a provision cutting federal government pensions that Oversight Republicans advanced Wednesday won’t pass the full House in its current form.

The quickest summary is that their proposals are unwise and unpopular, especially because they’re only made necessary by the extreme cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the rich. But if they cannot hammer all of this out into one “big, beautiful bill,” they will be forced to turn to the Democrats for support. And that would change literally everything, because once the Democrats have even an iota of power, they can leverage that to stop Trump’s steamroller is so many other areas.

Everything Trump has been doing in his second term has been predicated on the assumption that the Democrats do not have and will not gain any leverage until at least the midterms.

So, the stakes here could not be higher. In fact, the stakes are so high for the fascist regime and the Republicans that they still have a chance to succeed because failure would shatter their world.