Awful bill, awful process

And so it came to pass — in the most disgraceful fashion possible. Friday evening, Senate Republicans rammed through a tax bill that shreds the social contract, devastates states like New York, is a giveaway to the rich, adds $1.5 trillion to the deficit — and which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted before passage no one had managed to read.

With Republicans coming to the end of a lost first year of Donald Trump and desperate to pass something, anything, to show momentum, they closed their eyes and rammed their feet on the gas: no serious hearings, no outside analysis, a promised internal Treasury Department study that may never have been ordered in the first place.

The biggest bump in the road came Thursday, when — faced with a Joint Committee on Taxation study that showed their bill will add $1 trillion to the deficit even factoring rosy economic growth — senators tried to get their parliamentarian to approve a gimmick trigger to hike taxes if growth didn’t materialize as they predict.

When the parliamentarian denied the gimmick, the GOP went back behind closed doors and got most of the deficit hawks to back down.

So the Republican Party has now put its stamp of approval on legislation that will explode the federal deficit far above what they have repeatedly said are unacceptable levels. Mark this down.

While the ultimate shame lies with McConnell, the reputations of other Republicans who should know better are stained too.

With his yes vote, John McCain — who had made a commendable floor speech four months ago, shortly before voting against Obamacare repeal because of how the Senate had run roughshod over democratic process — effectively blessed an even more outrageous process.

Susan Collins — another anti-Obamacare repeal vote — wound up backing a bill that repeals the individual mandate, potentially causing 13 million Americans to lose their health coverage.

Jeff Flake — whose much praised floor speech little more than a month ago denounced not just Trump, but fellow senators who enabled his norm-defying behavior — voted for the bill in exchange for a promise to do right by Dreamers, eventually. Don’t hold your breath, senator.