It is entirely conceivable that, in two weeks’ time, the Republican Party’s leaders will have largely succeeded in railroading through Congress an unpopular, regressive, and damaging tax reform. That was their plan from the beginning, and so far it has worked out much as they intended. On Thursday, the House, spurred on by Paul Ryan, voted to approve its version of the legislation. Now everything depends on what happens in the Senate.

On Thursday night, just hours after the House vote, the Senate Finance Committee passed the Senate Republicans’ version of the tax bill on a party-line vote. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is planning to put the bill to a floor vote immediately after Thanksgiving. If the Senate approves the bill, the Republicans and President Trump will be on their way to victory. A conference committee would then reconcile the two bills, which differ in some significant details but not in their essentials. A final bill could be voted on and presented for Trump’s signature by the end of the year.

To get their tax plan through this final legislative stretch, the Republicans will try to rely on speed, subterfuge, and diversion. McConnell and Ryan have read the opinion polls. They know that there is widespread opposition to their plan’s major elements, such as its big tax cuts for corporations, unincorporated businesses, and rich people (like the President), or its new limits on popular deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes. That explains why the Republicans didn’t hold any hearings in the House, and why they are adopting similar blitzkrieg tactics in the Senate. The G.O.P.’s strategy is to rush this thing through before the other side has time to organize a defense.

In the days of yore, whenever a major legislative proposal was put forward, each chamber would spend a good deal of time discussing and dissecting it. Hearings would be scheduled; experts would be summoned. For example, in 2009, the Affordable Care Act took nearly five months to reach an initial vote in the House. But Ryan and Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, only introduced their tax bill, which is more than four hundred pages long, on November 2nd—all of two weeks ago. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Orrin Hatch, released his version, which is equally long and complicated, just a week ago. This pace is more akin to downhill skiing than to traditional legislating.

After winning Thursday’s vote in the House, Ryan said, “This is about giving hardworking taxpayers bigger paychecks, more take-home pay.” He said practically the same thing on November 2nd. In the interim, it has emerged that fully three-quarters of the tax cuts in the House bill go to corporations and businesses. It has also been confirmed that the bill’s paltry middle-class tax cuts are temporary, and that by 2027 most middle-income families would be paying more in taxes. The Senate bill treats middle-income Americans in a very similar fashion, according to a study released on Thursday by the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

The Republicans cannot afford to publicly acknowledge these realities. If they did so, they’d have to resort to the old trickle-down argument that handing out prime steaks to the rich will eventually enable the masses to purchase higher-quality burgers. Outside the Heritage Foundation and the editorial department of the Wall Street Journal, this is not a winning story. So Ryan and McConnell will stick to the subterfuge and hope for some helpful diversions.

So far, they have been pretty lucky on that front. With daily developments in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election, and famous men being outed as sexual harassers at a similar pace recently, the G.O.P.’s twin tax bills have received less media scrutiny than they usually would have, especially on television. On Thursday evening, all three of the major network-news shows relegated the House’s approval of the G.O.P. tax bill to the third story, behind the allegations against Senator Al Franken and the latest twists in the Roy Moore saga. On cable, meanwhile, CNN and Fox News both followed the same order on their 6 P.M. news shows.

As far as I could see, none of the networks spent much time examining who would benefit and who would lose if the Republican tax legislation were enacted. This was even true of NBC News, which earlier in the day had published online a damning analysis of how Trump and his heirs stand to gain more than a billion dollars if the Republicans succeed in abolishing the estate tax and getting other provisions enacted. On “NBC Nightly News,” that story’s analysis got a mention, but only a brief one. The White House and the G.O.P. leadership will be pleased about that.

As was the case during their efforts earlier this year to repeal Obamacare, Republicans’ biggest challenge will be limiting their defections in the Senate. When the full Senate makes its decision, the Party can afford to lose only two votes, and one Republican senator, Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, has already said that he won’t support the current version of the bill because, in his view, it unfairly favors large corporations over small businesses. By modifying how these businesses are treated, the G.O.P. leaders might be able to win Johnson over. But there are also questions about the intentions of at least four other Republican senators, all of whom have broken with the White House in the past: Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and John McCain.

Collins has raised objections about an amendment to the Senate bill that would abolish the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Corker and Flake have registered concerns about unfunded tax cuts leading to higher deficits. On Thursday night, McCain expressed concern about how the bill was being rushed through, saying that “it’s not regular order”—the same phrase he used when he opposed the Republicans’ health-care efforts.

Speaking on Thursday evening, Richard Blumenthal, the senior Democratic senator from Connecticut, said that he didn’t think the bill would pass. But he also said that Democratic activists would need to fight it just as hard as they fought the attempted repeal of Obamacare. That resistance effort lasted months. This battle could well be decided in the next fourteen days.