Republicans Passed Their Reconciliation Bill ‘in the Dead of Night.’ Can Democrats Make It an Issue?

Democrats have already found plenty to attack in the House-passed reconciliation bill. But they also think they found an attack in how it passed.

The chaotic process for getting President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” over the finish line included all-night markups from the Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees last week; a late-night markup in the Budget Committee on Sunday; and a marathon hearing in the Rules Committee that started at 1 a.m. on Wednesday.

Notably, the Rules hearing — to consider which amendments members would allow on the floor for the reconciliation bill — took place before Republicans even had a final version of the legislation.

From there, it was another mad sprint to pass the bill, with the House starting debate on the legislation around 2:40 a.m. on Thursday and passing the bill just before 7 a.m.

Speaker Mike Johnson, last to speak on the floor before the vote, tried to blunt the procedural attacks by making light of a bill that was debated largely in the dark.

“After a long week and a long night, and countless hours of work over the past year — a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork — my friends, it quite literally is, again, ‘Morning in America,’” Johnson said, summoning Ronald Reagan.

But for Democrats, there was nothing funny about the process and the legislative sprint that gave lawmakers little time to read the bill, let alone time for their constituents to process the text and issue feedback.

From the early hours of Wednesday morning in the Rules Committee to the early hours on the House floor Thursday night, Democrats lined up to speak against the reconciliation bill — and no phrase was as popular as “in the dead of night.”

“We’re voting in the dead of night, out of sight, because the Republican majority knows that the public will be outraged after they find out what is in this bill,” the top Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee, Rep. Mark Takano, said.

The chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Steven Horsford, said this was “no way to govern.”

“In the dead of the night, congressional Republicans are passing this partisan, big ugly bill for billionaires,” Horsford said.

Other Democrats noted that part of the problem with debating the legislation at this hour was that Republicans weren’t giving lawmakers much time to review the bill.

“It is 3:45 a.m. right now, and there are all sorts of provisions that we are discovering in this massive piece of legislation being rushed through in the dead of the night,” the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, Rep. Brendan Boyle, said, noting that he had been awake for 43 of the last 45 hours.

“This is not a debate that should have been happening in the middle of the night,” Boyle added. “It shouldn’t have happened in the middle of the night last night in the Rules Committee, and shouldn’t be happening in the middle of the night tonight.”

As Boyle noted, it wasn’t just that the floor debate was happening at an odd hour; this was a continuation of one marathon day in Congress that had started, for many, early Tuesday morning.

For Rules Committee members, there was practically no time to sleep this week. They had gone through a full day on Tuesday, then had to sit through a 22-hour hearing that started at 1 a.m. on Wednesday.

That unorthodox Rules hearing became the de facto frontlines for the process debate, with Democrats casting the hearing as “unprecedented,” and the committee’s chair, Rep. Virginia Foxx, presenting it as business as usual.

Foxx pointed to examples from 2007 and 2022, when Democrats held similar meetings in the middle of night, and she dismissed Democratic complaints that they hadn’t even received the manager’s amendment that could dramatically alter the bill.

“Our friends on the other side of the aisle love to cherry-pick the facts about how this meeting is taking place in the dark of night,” she said.

But the chair was clearly defensive for a reason. In fact, Foxx spoke for five minutes about the timing of the meeting before she ever actually got around to talking about the content of the legislation.

For most of Wednesday, as the 13-member Rules Committee debated the reconciliation bill, the timing of the vote wasn’t just a side detail or a passing comment for either party. The decision to start the hearing at 1 a.m. and hold legislative business as most of America slept was a feature of discussion. It was dissected again and again, by both parties, with debate stretching into normal business hours Wednesday and then back into the late evening.

As Democrats repeatedly pointed out, they also didn’t even have a final version of the legislation to review. Republicans held back their manager’s amendments until negotiations were finished Wednesday night. But the fact that GOP leaders were rushing this debate when most Americans were asleep was proof that their legislation was unpopular.

“When I was a teen, my late mother would often say nothing good happens after midnight,” Boyle said in the Rules Committee around 1:50 a.m. on Wednesday. “Now I know what she meant.”

For Republicans, the time complaints were just that — complaints, though Reps. Chip Roy and Ralph Norman on the Rules Committee openly questioned why Republicans were starting their hearing at 1 a.m.

The answer is complicated, but essentially it was the soonest they could hold the hearing.

Under House rules, Democrats on the Budget Committee get two “calendar days” to file their “minority views” after Sunday’s late-night markup. That meant Monday and Tuesday were out. The earliest Republicans could then hold the Rules hearing was Wednesday, and the panel has a one-hour notice requirement for meetings, taking lawmakers to the fated 1 a.m. hour on Wednesday.

But for Democrats, the late-night hearing was a signal that Republicans were rushing to pass a controversial bill before Americans could comprehend the legislation.

“Before we get into the substance here, I’ve got a simple question: What the hell are Republicans so afraid of?” Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, said. “What the hell are you so scared of that you guys are holding this hearing at 1 o’clock?”

For their part, Republicans tried to act as if this was normal for a panel that is sometimes referred to as “the midnight committee.”

Rep. Nick Langworthy, a GOP member of Rules, said the panel is a “24/7 on-call committee.”

“When I debated McGovern on the floor over this week’s rule, he made it all about the fact we are starting this meeting at 1 a.m., and obviously we did this so we had the same-day authority,” Langworthy told NOTUS Wednesday night.

He also dismissed concerns that Democrats could somehow turn the late-night process into an election talking-point.

“No one in 2026 is gonna say, ‘They had a meeting at 1 o’clock in the morning,’” Langworthy said.

But it wouldn’t be the first time that lawmakers have used procedural complaints to win elections. The manner in which Democrats rammed through Obamacare became a rallying cry for Tea Party Republicans during the 2010 midterms, so much so that when John Boehner took the speaker’s gavel, he established new rules designed to slow down the process and make sure lawmakers could actually read the legislation before they voted on it.

The fact that Republicans were just learning what was in the bill — and voting on a huge piece of legislation with new provisions on the state and local tax deduction and new Medicaid cuts that hadn’t been studied by the Congressional Budget Office — could very well become a potent message.

Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told NOTUS that the “dead-of-night” message would “absolutely” play a role in 2026 congressional races.

“If they were proud of the bill, they would not be doing it in the middle of the night,” DelBene said. “They’re not standing up for their communities, and it’s going to hurt them in 2026.”

Another House Democrat, who asked to remain anonymous in order to avoid wrath from individual Republicans, said they thought several Republicans “wrote their own political death warrant in the past week.”

“The process that they embraced and defended was atrocious, their bill is full of indefensible things, and some of them, like David Schweikert, were made to look like fools by Democrats,” this lawmaker said, specifically mentioning a tweet Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse had posted to X about vulnerable Republican Rep. David Schweikert.

(Schweikert, who actually missed the final vote, is currently in a reelection race that’s rated as a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report.)

Democrats think these are potent attacks, which is why they focused so much of their attention on the process during debate.

Before Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries enumerated all the reasons Democrats were against this reconciliation bill Thursday morning on the House floor, he noted that Republicans were trying to “jam down the throats of the American people” this bill “under the cover of darkness.”

Jeffries ended up speaking for 40 minutes on the bill. Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, next to speak, didn’t call out any of Jeffries’ numerous criticisms of the legislation.

He had just one thing to say.

“The Democrat leader is mistaken. We aren’t currently in the dead of night,” Smith said.

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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.