Senate Republicans Scribbled Changes Into the Tax Bill, and Democrats Aren’t Having It

On Friday evening, the text of the Senate tax bill was finally released to the public: nearly 500 pages with multiple sections ambiguously crossed out or subject to modifications written in largely illegible handwriting.

Senate Democrats have sounded off about this on Twitter:

On the Senate floor, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin said that in the copy of the bill he’d received, parts of the handwritten text on one page had been cut off at the margin:

We’re not even teaching cursive in a lot of schools anymore, but someone on the staff knew it enough to try. The problem is, they wrote it in cursive along the margin here – it’s about subchapter S corporations and how much tax they pay and what they don’t pay. I defy anybody to read it, because the problem was, when they copied it, they chopped off lines. So there aren’t full sentences here. They’re just kind of like little phrases and words. This is your United States Senate at work. This is what happens when you push through a bill late at night, desperate to pass it, without really stopping to ask yourself, “Will this really make us a stronger nation?”

A vote on the bill is expected later tonight.