After six months of work, Congress’ Republican majority thought it was finally on track to advance the GOP’s massive reconciliation bill, featuring massive tax breaks and dramatic Medicaid cuts. Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his team spent the last several days claiming that the chamber is on track to pass a bill by next week — ahead of members’ Memorial Day break — keeping the party on track to get the legislation signed into law by July 4.

That schedule seemed ambitious, and it now seems increasingly untenable. NBC News reported:

The GOP-led House Budget Committee voted to reject a sweeping package for President Donald Trump’s agenda on Friday, dealing an embarrassing setback to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Republican leaders. The vote in the Budget Committee was 16-21, with a band of conservative hard-liners who are pushing for steeper spending cuts joining all Democrats in voting against the multitrillion-dollar legislation, leaving its fate uncertain.

I can appreciate the fact that legislative procedure can get a little complicated, but pieces of the bill worked their way through key GOP-led House committees this week, and it fell on the House Budget Committee to pull the pieces together and craft one giant legislative package that combines the elements approved by the other panels.

This was, in other words, a key test — which the Republicans’ bill flunked. Indeed, given the number of GOP members on the committee who opposed their own party’s bill, the outcome wasn’t especially close.

It would be an overstatement to suggest the entire legislative effort is now dead. That’s simply not the case. But House GOP leaders invested a lot of effort into clearing this hurdle, and several of their members ended up balking anyway. In the coming days, the speaker and his leadership team will very likely take fresh steps to make their far-right flank happy, making it more likely that the bill will eventually clear the Budget Committee and start working its way to the floor, but at that point the Newtonian rules of physics are likely to kick in: The action will have an equal and opposite reaction, pushing members from competitive districts further away from the bill.

As for Donald Trump, whose far-right second-term agenda is wrapped up in this single piece of legislation, the president used his social media platform ahead of the vote to say, “Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’ … We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party. STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”

Soon after, several Republicans on the Budget Committee voted against the bill anyway, ignoring Trump’s directive.

The good news for the party is that GOP officials are likely to work throughout the weekend and will likely try again in the Budget Committee on Monday. The bad news for the party is that final passage on Thursday is still a long shot — if just three Republicans balk, the bill will almost certainly fall short — and Senate Republicans keep talking about how much they disapprove of the House’s version.

I know jokes about Republicans being in “disarray” are easy, but sometimes, they’re correct.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.