The nation watched with bated breath last week as Mitch McConnell and his colleagues, eager to show Republican megadonors that their support for a unified Republican government was not a total waste of their money, at last managed to steer a tax bill through the United States Senate. It appears that the process they used to get the bill through—complete with frantic eleventh-hour overhauls of key provisions, barely-explained additions from corporate lobbyists, and illegible edits scrawled into the bill's margins—yielded a final product that makes absolutely no sense. From Politico:

Republicans’ tax-rewrite plans are riddled with bugs, loopholes and other potential problems that could plague lawmakers long after their legislation is signed into law.

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Some provisions are so vaguely written they leave experts scratching their heads, like a proposal to begin taxing the investment earnings of rich private universities’ endowments. The legislation doesn’t explain what’s considered an endowment, and some colleges have more than 1,000 accounts.

Drafting errors in legislation, which is written by overworked Hill staffers whose bosses aren't known for being a detail-oriented bunch, are pretty common, especially when it comes to major initiatives like tax reform. (Or health care reform, as the Democrats still grappling with the consequences of stray language in the Affordable Care Act can attest.) This bill, however, appears to have reached a special level of incomprehensibility. Experts told Politico that many of its new features are easily susceptible to the exact type of evasion or gaming it was designed to deter. Certain provisions intended to encourage entrepreneurism would actually make it less lucrative to start a business. And a brand-new international taxation system that legislators have yet to finalize is set to take effect on January 1, even though McConnell hopes to have a bill on the president's desk by Christmas.

“The more you read, the more you go, ‘Holy crap, what’s this?'” said Greg Jenner, a former top tax official in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department. “We will be dealing with unintended consequences for months to come because the bill is moving too fast.”

The conference committee process exists in part to address deficiencies like these, but some of the bill's more glaring problems threaten to jeopardize the entire operation. The corporate alternative minimum tax, which McConnell revived at the last minute in order to comply with the upper chamber's budget rules, is now expected to result in a $300 billion tax increase for the business community. (Oops.) Senate Republicans' efforts to resolve this screw-up behind closed doors, though, will likely be complicated by the fact that the version passed by their House colleagues eliminated the corporate AMT altogether—and that Republicans in Congress have shown little interest in budging on this point. "I think that has to be eliminated," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told CNBC as the dust settled on the Senate's bill. (Again, oops.)

At this point, passing a toothless tax reform bill—or even an objectively bad one—has become a more desirable outcome for Trump and McConnell and Ryan than ending a year of unified Republican government having passed no tax reform bill at all. The legislative sloppiness that accompanies this by-any-means-necessary mentality will inevitably have serious consequences for the American people. Unfortunately, we probably won't know what those consequences are until they happen.