By Katherine Tinsley
4:05pm PDT, Jul 3, 2025
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Lawrence O'Donnell mocked House Republicans for approving
Donald Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill despite the legislation having a glaring mistake in it: They pushed forward the bill without an escape clause for themselves. Without the rule, they would be forced to take yet another vote on the bill — even if they knew they didn't have the required number of votes. While not catastrophic to the legislation, the error revealed House Republicans' "incompetence," O'Donnell said.
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"It has a mistake in it," Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out on the Wednesday, July 2, 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."
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"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,'" Lawrence O'Donnell said in disbelief.
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"We've never seen anything like that in the House — not something that stupid," Lawrence O'Donnell said. "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."
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The mistake in the GOP-backed Big, Beautiful Bill raised questions about the party's ability to lead. "Panic set in among House Republicans and within the Trump White House," Lawrence O'Donnell said. "While Republicans may now try to fix the error with an amendment, [Jim] 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?'"
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Lawrence O'Donnell went on to slam Derrick Van Orden for saying that House Republicans who caved to Donald Trump were "not a bunch of little b******." Said the MSNBC host, "Okay, no one said you were." He added that the comment was "breathtakingly pathetic." Continued O'Donnell, "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 b******' is your term, Congressman Derrick Van Orden — not mine."
