Republican leaders on Capitol Hill imposed an exceedingly difficult timeline on themselves. In order to get the party’s massive reconciliation bill, featuring massive tax breaks and dramatic Medicaid cuts, to Donald Trump’s desk by July 4, the GOP-led House would have to pass its version before the chamber’s Memorial Day break — which begins later this week.

With this in mind, several Republicans on the House Budget Committee appeared to throw a wrench into the party’s plans late last week, rejecting the far-right plan as not quite radical enough. But while congressional action late on a Sunday night is very rare on Capitol Hill, GOP officials made an exception in this endeavor, and as NBC News reported, the efforts paid off.

The House Budget Committee advanced President Donald Trump’s multitrillion-dollar domestic policy package Sunday night, two days after a group of conservatives voted to reject it. The vote was 17-16 along party lines, with the four Republicans who opposed the bill in committee Friday voting “present.”

For GOP leaders, the outcome was a relief, especially after Friday’s embarrassing setback, but success is by no means assured. Indeed, the right-wing House Freedom Caucus said in an overnight statement that the legislation “does not yet meet the moment.”

Given that the bill will fail if three or more Republican members balk, as the package advances to the House Rules Committee, it’s likely that House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team will have to continue to make the legislation even more radical, while expecting GOP members from competitive districts to go along. All of this will have to happen — by the party’s own schedule — over the course of roughly four days.

At that point, if the party’s plan works out, the bill would go to the Republican-led Senate, where several members have already indicated that they’re planning to make dramatic changes.

But as the political world considers what might happen next, it’s worth pausing to appreciate not only the speed with which GOP lawmakers are moving, but their motivation for rushing to such a reckless and irresponsible degree.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn wrote a very smart piece on this, noting that it was just seven days ago when legislative language was first made available. “In all, lawmakers had less than 72 hours to digest, debate, and vote on deep Medicaid cuts that — according to CBO’s preliminary, partial estimate — will cause more than 7 million Americans to lose health insurance and millions more to face higher medical costs,” Cohn explained.

Governing isn’t supposed to work this way. Indeed, throughout modern American history, policymakers knew better: In 1986, when the Reagan White House and congressional Republicans took up their big tax reform package, they held more than a dozen legislative hearings with experts and invested six months into detailed negotiations.

Those days are long gone. In 2017, when Trump and GOP lawmakers scrambled to pass their own package of tax cuts, they negotiated in secret, wrote a bill behind closed doors, ignored every analysis submitted by independent scorekeepers and subject-matter experts, and moved it through the committee process in a matter of days without so much as a single hearing about the impact of their legislation. (For more on this, see the second chapter of my first book.)

Eight years later, they’re doing it again. Indeed, Politico reported last week that many House Republicans are endorsing a bill despite not knowing what’s in it.

As for why the party is doing this, the motivation is simple: Time kills bills. The longer the process takes, the more opponents can marshal their resources, the more members can learn about the far-right package’s many “surprises,” the more journalists can highlight its flaws — and the more Americans can call Capitol Hill and urge their representatives to vote against this monstrosity.

This worked in the first year of the president’s first term. We’re poised to learn whether history is about to repeat itself.