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Happy Thursday morning from Philadelphia.

After 10 p.m. last night, the House passed a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending package that will keep federal agencies open until Sept. 30. The measure now goes onto the Senate, which is expected to pass it as well, although there may be some opposition from conservative Republicans.

The House has also approved a short-term funding bill that gives the Senate until March 15 to complete work on the omnibus. The Senate will take this up today.

The omnibus package includes more than $13 billion in military and humanitarian funding for Ukraine, which has been invaded by tens of thousands of Russian troops. U.S. aid will go to Eastern European nations dealing with more than 2 million Ukrainians who have fled the bloody Russian onslaught, as well as NATO allies now facing a renewed security threat.

But there was also a lot of drama Wednesday over $15 billion in Covid preparedness funding, money that had been requested by the White House. That was eventually stripped from the package following a revolt by rank-and-file Democrats. We have a lot more on that episode below.

The other subplot on Wednesday – although far less important ultimately – was whether House Democrats would still hold their party retreat in Philadelphia. They did, although Democrats were forced to cancel their first day. We’re already on the ground here.

Inside what happened yesterday

Here’s a question that’s bouncing around House Democratic circles right now: How did leadership get blindsided by this uprising in their ranks? And what does it mean?

We spent much of yesterday trying to figure this out.

Here’s the background: House and Senate appropriators have been working for months on an omnibus FY 2022 spending package. Late in the game, the White House requested $22.5 billion in new Covid preparedness money. This was less than what many on Capitol Hill were expecting, but for Senate Republicans, it was still too much. They wanted it to be offset by cuts elsewhere.

House and Senate Democratic leaders, with White House approval, decided to claw back expired Covid relief money to cover the request. They settled on a new total – $15 billion. With government funding expiring on at midnight Friday – and House Democrats set to leave town for their retreat – Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled a vote on the omnibus package for Wednesday afternoon. The leadership fully expected the measure to pass, despite the fact that members had less than 12 hours to review the 2,741-page bill.

But then rank-and-file Democrats – egged on in some cases by blue-state governors – revolted. Pelosi was forced to abruptly shift gears and strip the Covid funding out of the larger omnibus package. There’ll now be a vote on a standalone Covid-funding bill in the House next week, although it faces a dim outlook in the Senate.

There are a few ways to look at what happened.

Let’s be clear: There’s plenty of blame to go around. Right now, there are fingers pointing in every possible direction.

But let’s start on the Hill.

Pelosi didn’t make this decision alone. Although the speaker’s critics say that the leadership team has become too insular, that her circle of close confidants has become too small for her own good. In this case, the White House, House and Senate had all signed off on a plan, yet no one thought this budgetary offset could prove problematic.

The theory goes like this: After nearly two decades running the House Democratic Caucus, Pelosi has concentrated too much power in the speaker’s office. Important decisions are made on the fly without much buy-in from rank-and-file Democrats or even members of her leadership team. And Pelosi has to be involved in every matter that occurs inside the caucus. This places enormous demands on the speaker and her staff, and further slows the process down. Yes, in theory, her leadership table is the biggest it’s ever been. Yet the group with the real power is the smallest ever, her Democratic detractors say.

In turn, Democratic lawmakers are sometimes asked to swallow policies they don’t want or can’t support. They fight back, opposing leadership both in public and private. And then chaos ensues. It has been a recurring theme this Congress. Just look at how many times Democratic leaders tried to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill before actually succeeding.

Pelosi allies push back hard here, noting the speaker has an exceedingly narrow, four-vote margin to work with on a daily basis. The House Democratic Caucus is also split between two vocal ideological camps that often clash. The small margin also leads to some lawmakers growing emboldened enough to throw their weight around and make demands whenever they can.

Senior Democrats say the House Democratic leadership has a rocky relationship with a coterie of White House aides who seem to favor Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s strategic insights over the speaker’s. In turn, there’s plenty of griping in the Democratic leadership about the White House. In senior Democrats’ view, the White House okayed the troublesome offset, and then offered no backing when governors and rank-and-file House Democrats threw a fit.

The House and the Senate are constantly on different pages – although Schumer and Pelosi make sure they’re unified publicly. Yet no one on the Democratic leadership on the Hill or at the White House completely trusts each other. That was glaringly evident during the failed struggle to pass the Build Back Better Act. Remember Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) letter that Pelosi had no idea about?

In this case, Pelosi, Schumer and the White House all signed off on the Covid preparedness plan, they say, but Pelosi alone was left to handle the clean up. And she did; the omnibus is on its way to the Senate after an impressively large bipartisan vote in the House. In looking at her overall record, Pelosi has proven to be the most prolific and successful House legislator in decades.

These kinds of deals – messy legislative horse trading – are necessary in a political environment with a 60-vote threshold in the Senate and a four-vote margin in the House. In Pelosi’s view, she did what was needed to protect hard-fought wins in the omnibus. Pelosi is an old-school appropriator who understands the give-and-take of legislation and is well accustomed to not getting what she wants all the time.

“You’re telling Noah about the flood,” Pelosi quipped Wednesday during her weekly press conference. “I didn’t get what I wanted either. Yeah, it’s a negotiation and that’s what it is. And look at what is in the bill and what it does for America’s working families, what it does for Ukraine.”

Pelosi later added: “I have the greatest respect for each and every one of my members, their representatives. They represent their districts. That’s their job title. That’s their job description. But right here, we’re in a battle. And what has come out of this legislation … for America’s working families is something quite remarkable.”

Pelosi’s leadership team doesn’t think they have a problem. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told us this in an interview Wednesday evening:

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said he didn’t see the revolt coming. “It was not my call,” Clyburn said. “How do you know how big the problem is going to be? There’s always a problem when you’re cutting.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Progressive Caucus, put it this way:

Reminder: We’re hosting our Cocktails & Conversations event tonight at the Democratic retreat. If you’re attending the conference, join us from 4-6 p.m. for drinks and a fireside conversation with Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). See you there!

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