In Washington, all eyes are on the Senate today. They are currently going through the procedure known as "vote-a-rama" (which is right up there with the "Byrd bath" when it comes to cutesy-poo terms for legislative activity). The vote-a-rama is taking place on the Republican budget bill (which is not cutesy at all, because it is filled with poo).

Democrats are pretty united in their opposition to the entire budget. Two Republicans have indicated they will also be a "No" vote (Thom Tillis and Rand Paul), which means the bill can only lose one more GOP vote and still pass (with the vice president's tie-breaking vote).

My prediction is that it will pass today, and that even if Lisa Murkowski decides to vote against it, Susan Collins will (as usual) cave to the intraparty pressure and vote for it. That would all be about par for the course, really.

Once (or "if") it passes the Senate, it will go back to the House, which is actually (gasp!) going to interrupt one of their myriad weeks-long vacations to return to Washington for a snap vote. If the version of the bill that passes the Senate also passes the House, they can still make their entirely-self-inflicted deadline and put it on Donald Trump's desk to sign on July 4th.

My prediction for this is that it won't easily pass the House, though. I could be wrong about this, since if the Senate does manage to pass something the pressure from Trump et al on GOP House members to just hold their noses and pass the Senate version will become absolutely enormous. But if a large enough group of GOP House members band together and refuse to vote for it, they may avoid Trump's wrath becoming overly personal towards each of them.

The bill originally passed the House on the thinnest of margins, and it passed with a whole bunch of promises that "the Senate would fix it," or conversely that "the Senate won't touch it at all," neither of which was very realistic to begin with. Just as before, there will be hardliners who insist that the bill doesn't slash spending on the poor enough, while the moderates recoil in horror at the prospect of running for re-election against a barrage of ads pointing out how this bill will throw more than 10 million people off of Medicaid. Some sort of accommodation will be demanded from both factions, and it will be up to Speaker Mike Johnson to thread the needle once again -- except this time he won't be able to promise them "don't worry, changes will be made," since it'll be the final product. They may even hold (informally behind the scenes or formally) a conference committee to make sure that whatever compromises the House strikes are still acceptable enough to a majority of the Senate. But either way, this will almost certainly punt the bill beyond the July 4th deadline -- unless this whole process happens at lightspeed (which is actually a possibility, due to the overwhelming pressure Trump will bring to bear).

This bill will quite likely be the only major piece of legislation passed this year (or even perhaps "this entire congressional session"), unless they actually pass next year's budget on time [pause for laughter...] when they get back from their month-long August vacation. What this means is that whatever passes is going to be the centerpiece of the midterm congressional campaigns. And Democrats are going to try to hang this around the Republicans' necks like an albatross, that much is already certain.

The bill is massively unpopular already. And the more the public finds out what is in it, the less popular it gets. Republicans are counting on running on how many wonderful tax cuts they passed (since this has been their basic campaign strategy for the past few decades), but there are two big problems with this plan. The first is that the bill does have a few new tax cuts in it (making tip income and overtime pay tax-free), but it largely just continues the tax cuts passed in Trump's first term in office. The second is that -- as usual with Republican tax bills -- the lion's share of tax benefits will go to the wealthiest people. This time, this is exacerbated by the fact that the poorest people will actually lose money on the deal.

Continuing a tax cut is not the same thing as creating a new one. This has always been the toughest thing for Republicans in creating this bill. Say you are a taxpayer and your income taxes regularly cost you $7,500 (just to randomly pick a number from thin air). The Republicans pass a "tax cut" and so you look forward to it but when you sit down to do your taxes next year you find out that you still are paying the same $7,500. "Where's my tax cut?" you would wonder, right? The Republicans would be left trying to explain: "Well, if we had done nothing, then your taxes would have gone way up, but they didn't, so there's your big, beautiful tax cut! You're welcome!" This is not exactly going to be convincing, as you can see. Even if your total tax bill drops to, say, $7,250, that's still not going to be very impressive or change your household's budget much at all.

The bill has so many bad ideas in it that it is impossible to list them all here (especially since the bill's final text is still in flux during the vote-a-rama process). Democrats will be pointing all of this out over the next year and a half. And it's certainly a "target-rich environment" (as the military says), since it is chock full of pettiness and stupidity inspired by Donald Trump's many whims. The bill will decimate the solar and windpower energy sectors, in two separate ways (it will hit companies trying to build future projects and it will hit the domestic industry that builds these components). This will essentially leave China as the world leader in the technologies, and cede any sort of effort to make the United States competitive. This, as you can see, is both short-sighted and will damage the American economy. And that's just one example of what's in this bill -- all because Donald Trump hates solar and windpower.

The biggest thing Democrats will focus on in this bill is how Republicans are gutting Medicaid, though. Estimates are that 11 million Americans will lose their medical coverage. And a whole lot of them live in rural areas or red states. When they lose their coverage and their local hospitals close their doors forever as a direct result, they will be faced with what voting Republican truly means for them. All so Elon Musk can get a gigantic tax break.

As I said, I think that the bill is going to pass, in some format or another, whether by Trump's self-imposed deadline or not. It has the feel of one of those "too big to fail" bills -- the only real Republican train that will be leaving the congressional station this year (or even "until after the midterms"). The pressure to just get something done is already sky-high. And Trump doesn't really care about any of the details in the bill at all -- he just wants to have his big signing ceremony. So it really does feel pretty inevitable at this point.

But we've still got all the circus acts to watch until we get to that point, so I will now return to watching all the ins and outs of the vote-a-rama as the Senate slouches towards taking a final vote....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant