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As Senate Democrats were getting ready for the final votes on their big health care and climate legislation late last week, their Republican counterparts seemed prepared to make one last, desperate stand: They were going to force votes on an array of controversial amendments, pull out every available procedural delay and rouse their supporters at the grassroots level, all in the hopes of breaking Democratic unanimity or, absent that, making the final vote on the legislation as politically painful as possible.

It was going to be a familiar ritual; there had been similar spectacles in the past. On Capitol Hill, staff, advocates and journalists hunkered down and checked supplies my indefatigable colleague Igor Bobic said he was stocking up on Red Bull and Girl Scout Cookies and the only question was whether it would last until Monday or Tuesday, or maybe even longer if one of the wavering Democratic senators had second thoughts or new demands.

But by Saturday evening, it was clear the Republicans hearts werent in it.

They passed up an opportunity to demand a reading of the bill, which alone would have taken several hours, and they eventually agreed to tighten the time of debate on each amendment. During the proceedings, GOP leaders put out press releases, throwing out familiar arguments about Democratic tax hikes supposedly killing the economy or reforms to prescription drug prices supposedly killing Medicare . But the whole effort had a bland, perfunctory feel to it this was nothing like the emotional outbursts during the final days of debate over the Affordable Care Act .

It was actually hard to find coverage of the legislation at outlets like FoxNews.com and Breitbart, at least based on my spot checks over the weekend.

In the end, the bill passed with relatively little drama on Sunday afternoon, leaving Democrats to celebrate and Republicans to make a hasty exit for the airports, so they could get a start on the August recess. (Heres the full HuffPost writeup , if you missed it, and heres Chris DAngelos explainer on the all-important climate provisions.)

The timing may help explain why the GOP response was so lethargic. With temperatures in the 90s and likely to approach 100 in the coming days, nobody wanted to stay in Washington. But I think the listless final pushback on Democratic legislation was also emblematic of the GOPs posture throughout this debate, going back to when President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders first laid out their legislative agenda early last year.

Remember, those early proposals were a lot more ambitious than what Democrats ultimately passed. Build Back Better , as they used to call it, included not just major action on climate and health care but also new entitlements for child care and home care , not to mention what would have arguably been the biggest anti-poverty initiatives in decades. But Republicans never attacked these plans as vigorously as they went after previous Democratic initiatives.

So what gives? Why have Republicans offered such weak resistance to this sweeping, potentially historic piece of Democratic legislation? A few theories come to mind including one that may say a lot about the state of the Republican Party, now that its been fully Trumpified.

The Legislations Design Made It Harder To Attack

The first theory is that the Democrats just did an unusually good job of limiting their agenda to popular, hard-to-attack initiatives. Thats especially true for the policies that were left at the end of the process, after Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) had extracted their concessions.

For their climate agenda, Democrats had abandoned the Obama-era approach of trying to tax carbon emissions, opting instead to make clean energy more attractive by subsidizing it in effect, throwing money at industries and consumers who opt for climate-friendly options, rather than penalizing those who dont. The single biggest reason the bill went down in 2010 is that it relied too much on sticks, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told HuffPost, referring to a cap-and-trade proposal that passed the House but never got through the Senate. (Slates Jordan Weissmann has an excellent explainer on this shift if you want to read more.)

For their health care agenda, Democrats stuck to making prescriptions cheaper by lowering out-of-pocket costs for seniors and giving the federal government new leverage to bring down prices . If the polls are right, these are literally some of the most popular policies in politics today , with especially strong appeal to a voting bloc (older white voters) that Republicans desperately need to keep.

These plans are all light on the pain and heavy on the gain, except for large corporations (whose taxes would go up) and the drug industry (whose revenue would go down). Politically, those are not the easiest groups for Republicans to defend, at least publicly.