On Tuesday, six weeks after unveiling the details of their long-awaited tax reform proposal, the House and Senate are expected to pass an agreed-upon compromise version of the bill that they will send to President Trump's desk for a signature. Barring a miraculous, A Christmas Carol-esque change of heart from multiple legislators sometime in the next few hours, the Republican Party will soon be responsible the most significant transfer of wealth from poor Americans to rich ones in modern history. Paul Ryan is so fired up about it that he spliced together a vanity pump-up video to mark the occasion, setting his greatest hits to a vaguely urgent classical music soundtrack that sounds like it should back a luxury car commercial:

Let's get it done. Never mind that "it," in this case, checks none of the boxes that a Young Paul Ryan outlined while contorting his brow into increasingly impossible positions. The bill will likely send more jobs overseas, instead of creating incentives for employers to keep them stateside. Whatever existing provisions Ryan thinks qualify as loopholes are being replaced with different loopholes that happen to benefit very wealthy people, some of whom are serving as elected officials in the federal government. And the oft-promised simplification of the tax code, punctuated by that absurd "fill out your taxes on a postcard" line to which Ryan turns whenever pressed to explain why, exactly, a bill that would rip a $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit is actually a good thing? Not happening, either.

Nonetheless, Paul Ryan forges ahead, because his ego won't allow him to do anything else. Remember that the Speaker is, at his core, an overgrown Atlas Shrugged-toting college Republicans president who printed out the Wikipedia article on Reaganomics one day and has studiously avoided reading any other literature on the subject ever since. For God's sake, this is the same person who has admitted to "dreaming" about taking health care away from poor people since his college days tapping kegs, and who abandoned his Responsible Governance Principles the moment he thought that goal might be within reach. His is an intellectually bankrupt proposal designed to achieve a morally bankrupt outcome, and he's been waiting for this moment for his entire professional life. Even though all the available evidence indicates that the bill fails to fulfill any of his promises, for an ideologue as parched for success as Ryan is, passing something bad by lying about its contents is more palatable than passing nothing at all.

Imagine the level of self-delusion it takes, when asked if he is concerned about the fact that the bill is "deeply unpopular" with his constituents, to respond thusly: