The Republican tax bill, by all indications, is headed for a conference committee, the process by which the Senate and House's dueling versions will be merged into a single piece of legislation. Despite polls showing the bill is only slightly more popular than getting stuck in traffic or struck with pneumonia, the GOP is moving on, convinced that passing a widely reviled tax plan is the path to political salvation.

But what, exactly, are Republicans in Congress selling here? As I've noted previously, the economic rationale for the bill doesn't exist; it fixes no real-world issue. It's full of faux solutions in search of problems.

That's not the only way in which the bill is an insult to America's intelligence, though. Four things about the effort, in fact, show just how little the GOP cares about the truth regarding its bill or the integrity of political debate. Perhaps the best thing one can say about it is that it perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with today's political process.

1. It's not a "middle-class" tax cut. Republicans have been selling their bill as a boon to the middle-class, a way to finally kick-start moribund wage growth. But here's what Republican Rep. Mark Sanford, S.C., he of Appalachian Trail fame, had to say about that tactic: "Fundamentally, the bill has been mislabeled. From a truth in advertising standpoint, it would have been a lot simpler if we just acknowledged reality on this bill, which is it's fundamentally a corporate tax reduction and restructuring bill, period."

Indeed, there's little reason to think that middle-class Americans will see much of any benefit from the bill. Yes, some will get a small tax cut in the coming years, before those cuts phase out down the road, part of a transparent GOP gimmick to mask the true budgetary impact of the legislation. But the thousands of dollars in wage hikes the GOP is promising that businesses will shower on their workers thanks to the giant corporate tax cut won't materialize. Corporate America, in fact, has made it abundantly clear that further enriching the already enriched is Plan A once the bill becomes law.

Political Cartoons on the Economy View All 302 Images

2. Deficit hypocrisy. Republicans spent the entirety of the Obama administration caterwauling about the debt, citing it as justification to oppose essentially everything and anything Democrats wanted to accomplish. It's hard to overstate just how much deficit hysteria there was at the time; it infected every bit of the political debate.

Now, though, Republicans have no problem passing a tax bill that costs some $1.5 trillion without even blinking. More sympathetic scorers that try to incorporate economic growth effects into their models – and such growth will likely not come to pass – still find the GOP running up costs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Joint Committee on Taxation says that even with growth effects the GOP insisted on including, the bill will add a cool $1 trillion to the national debt.

Deficit hypocrisy isn't new, of course, but the swiftness with which the GOP abandoned all its deficit and debt concerns shows just how much everything it spent the previous eight years saying was simply unprincipled political opportunism. Democrats may have even learned their lesson by realizing that spending too much time focused on the deficit pays no political dividends at all. (As well they should; it's not deficits that matter, but what that borrowing actually buys for the country that's the issue.)

3. Process hypocrisy. It's pretty much gospel on the right that Obamacare, President Barack Obama's signature domestic law, was "rammed through" Congress. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's exhortation that lawmakers had to pass the bill to figure out what was in it (as out of context as that remark was taken) became a rallying cry for proper process and procedure, and a return to "regular order." Republicans promised up and down to read bills and go through committees and blah blah blah.

Well, here's a handy comparison of the process used to pass Obamacare versus that used on the tax bill so far.

Remember when the GOP complained about the ACA being "rushed through?"



Well, here is what a truly rushed legislative process looks like. pic.twitter.com/T0QoyPro36 — Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) December 4, 2017

It was abundantly clear last week that Republicans had enough votes to pass the tax bill before they had finished drafting it. Again, process complaints are nothing new in Washington, but the breadth and depth of the hypocrisy is still startling. It's like the GOP has been condemned by some deity somewhere to actually commit every process violation it accused Democrats of committing during the Obama years, except by several orders of magnitude.

4. Calling it "tax reform." The fundamental lie at the heart of the bill, though, is that it is in any way "tax reform." When that phrase is uttered, it is supposed to call to mind the 1986 tax reform bill, a famously bipartisan effort in which tax rates were lowered but enough other crud was cleaned out of the tax code that the whole thing paid for itself.

As former Rep. Claudine Schneider, a Republican from Rhode Island who worked on the 1986 bill, wrote here, the GOP's current effort is a far cry from what occurred three decades ago. It lowers rates, sure, but makes basically none of the hard choices necessary to clean up the tax code. What few deductions and credits it does cut back on or eliminate seem explicitly targeted at hurting people who live in liberal, urban areas, rather than on anything related to economic efficiency or fairness. It's not reform, it's paying using the tax code to pay off favored constituencies and punish political opponents, all the while leaving the system as complicated tomorrow as it is today.