"Cliff" bill is a bitter pill for House's tea party adherents to swallow To a tea-party-influenced crop of House Republicans, the bill to resolve the "fiscal cliff" crisis was everything they had wanted to change about the way Washington worked. Too rushed. Too bloated. Too secretive. Too expensive. "There's lots and lots of pork in this bill," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). On Tuesday would come their last test. After the Senate passed the compromise bill, the GOP-controlled House had to decide whether to accept it as is, or reject it and run the risk of triggering an economic disaster. The fiscal-cliff bargain had been worked out on the phone by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two 70-year-olds with a combined 68 years in office in Washington. They stepped in after President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) tried, and failed, to reach a far-reaching agreement to tackle the debt. Instead, McConnell and Biden lowered their ambitions and cut a "small deal." It would raise marginal tax rates only for a sliver of high-earning individuals and avert a massive budget cut by pushing it back for two months. But "small" was really not the the best description. The bill would carry a substantial cost. Although it would raise some taxes, it also would extend the vast majority of the Bush-era tax cuts, as well as loopholes for many businesses. In all, the bill would cause deficits to rise by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But that estimated increase is based on the massive tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to take effect without a fiscal cliff resolution. House Republicans wanted the Bush tax cuts to be extended. But they had also wanted big spending cuts. To many of them, the bill looked like a massive failure of will. "To pass something at 2 o'clock in the morning, when the senators didn't even get a real good chance to look at it, we're tired of that," said Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), elected in 2010 and defeated in November. He faced the prospect of casting his final vote in Congress on this package. I think it's important to do it right. There's a lot of us who feel that way. This is what we did with Obamacare - now look what we're living with," Walsh said, referring to the health-care law. We don't want to do that again. The bill that McConnell and Biden crafted was also not small in a physical sense. It ran to more than 30,000 words of small type. And many of those words had nothing to do with the marquee controversies of the fiscal cliff. Instead, McConnell and Biden had included Capitol Hill's version of stowaways: "riders," unrelated provisions, attached to this bill because somebody in power wanted badly for them to pass.