> But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome. It's a terrible outcome, you just may have not had a better one

> But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome. It's a terrible outcome, you just may have not had a better one available to you. But let's not mince words, a 5500 page bill that no one has read in its entirety and that Congresspeople are blindly voting on because they literally do not have any other choice except to shut down the government during a pandemic -- that is a bad outcome. > There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. I strongly agree. I think where we differ is that I'm looking at the end result of that process as the fruits of that institutional failing, not as some kind of heroic last-minute turnaround that saved the day. I don't mean to disparage the work you or others put in here, but you can have a multi-month project that gets ignored until the last week and you can accurately say at that point that there's no other choice but to throw something together in a few days to satisfy the requirements, and you might even do something incredible to get any finished project at all. But that doesn't mean the result isn't terrible. I'm not giving anybody kudos over this, people should be looking at this result and saying, "something is seriously wrong with our political system that a bill like this is what we ended up with." That should be the main takeaway. A political system that only works during crisis, and that can only get the legislation passed when there's no other choice except to shut down the government -- that's a broken political system. It's not something anyone at any point in the process should be proud of.