Lawrence O’Donnell Gleefully Mocks House Republicans Over Big, Beautiful Bill Vote: ‘It Has a Mistake In It’ | Video

Lawrence O’Donnell mocked House Republicans for putting forward President Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill vote with a mistake in it, an error that shot themselves in the foot.

“It has a mistake in it,” O’Donnell said on Wednesday night’s episode of “The Last Word.” “They all know that the real leading expert on House rules is Democrat Jim McGovern, the Democratic leader of the House Rules Committee. They know that the Republican chair of the House Rules Committee, Virginia Foxx, is completely and permanently incompetent—always has been, always will be—along with her staff.”

The MSNBC host went on to explain the difference between how legislation is voted on between the Senate and the House. For example in the Senate, rules do not change but in the House, the Rules Committee—controlled by the party in power—writes the rule for every bill. It is standard for the rule to say that no amendments will be allowed once the bill reaches the floor. 

“The incompetent Republicans did such a bad job of writing that very simple, one-paragraph rule that Jim McGovern was able to stop everything in the House of Representatives today by announcing: ‘It has a mistake in it,’” O’Donnell said in disbelief.

“We’ve never seen anything like that in the House—not something that stupid,” he continued. “For the next 11 hours, the Republican-controlled House was paralyzed by that mistake. Usually in the House, no one in the Republican Party listens to anything said by Democrats on the floor. But this time, everyone heard what Congressman Jim McGovern said when he started a drama like we’ve never seen before.”

The host explained in layman’s terms that Republicans pushed forward the bill and didn’t include an out for themselves. So if they began debating, and the GOP realized they didn’t have the votes, they would still have to take the vote. O’Donnell chastised Speaker Mike Johnson for not knowing anything about governmental procedure and that it quickly became clear they didn’t have the votes.  

“Panic set in among House Republicans and within the Trump White House,” O’Donnell said. “While Republicans may now try to fix the error with an amendment, McGovern posed a critical question: ‘If this Republican leadership cannot get a one-paragraph rule right, can we really trust them to get an 870-page bill right?’”

The mistake allowed Democrats to go to the mic and request amendments to cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, a main pushback on the bill from both sides of the aisle. Despite the Democrats’ attempts, Republicans blocked every single amendment request on the House floor.

O’Donnell also took a moment to blast some of the GOP members who have capitulated to Trump’s demands including Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin who said, “we’re not a bunch of little bitches” for giving up all his prior objections to the bill. 

“OK. No one said you were,” O’Donnell said as he called Van Orden’s defense “breathtakingly pathetic.” “I mean, we’ve said negative things about what you’re voting for and what you’re willing to do, and many of us have said negative things about the cruelty that you’re willing to inflict on people here and around the world. But ‘little bitches’ is your term, Congressman Derrick Van Orden—not mine.”

You can watch the full “The Last Word” segment in the video above.

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