WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Monday rammed through a new scheme obscuring the cost of trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the howls of Democrats, who called it a stealth attack against the filibuster that would come back to haunt them when they are in the majority.
Republicans claimed that President Donald Trump’s $4 trillion tax and spending bill would only add about $500 billion to the deficit through 2034. But that estimate is only reached by relying on a budget gimmick known as “current policy,” which assumes existing policies like Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that are due to expire this year have already been extended. This creative accounting method has never been used before for legislation passed via reconciliation, the special fast-track process allowing budget bills to pass with 51 votes instead of 60.
In reality, however, the bill would explode the nation’s deficits, adding nearly $4 trillion to the debt when including interest, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’ official budget scorekeepers. That’s $500 billion more than the House version of the bill. The cost would rise to nearly $5 trillion if the temporary business tax cuts in the bill were made permanent.
“Rather than be honest with the American people about the true costs of their billionaire giveaways, Republicans are doing something the Senate has never, never done before, deploying fake math and accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of their bill,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor.
It’s not just Democrats calling out this sleight of hand accounting, either. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pointed out that the bill contains a provision hiking the debt ceiling by $5 trillion ― the largest-ever single increase to the statutory borrowing limit.
“That is an admission they know they aren’t controlling the deficit,” Paul said Sunday. “They know that the ensuing years will add trillions more. The authors of the bill are anticipating adding more …That’s why I’m a no.”
Democrats sought to challenge the use of “current policy” over the weekend in a meeting with the Senate parliamentarian, a referee that advises the chamber on whether provisions in the bill comply with reconciliation rules allowing them to pass with 51 votes instead of 60. The parliamentarian has already ruled that some provisions in the bill do not comply with those rules. But Republicans refused to allow a bipartisan meeting specifically on the use of “current policy.” They maintained that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), has the sole authority to determine which accounting method can be used to pass legislation.
“Chair Graham has set that we will be using current policy baseline, therefore, no [reconciliation] rules are violated as Dems have suggested.” a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told HuffPost.
“I’m not the first chairman to change the baseline for different reasons,” Graham said Sunday.
An analysis by CBO, which relied on the traditional “current law” budget baseline, however, said that the bill would increase deficits after 2034, violating a key rule that bills passed via reconciliation not add to the deficit beyond a 10-year window.
In effect, Republicans blocked the parliamentarian from ruling on the matter to avoid having to overrule her likely adverse opinion on the Senate floor. Senate GOP leaders repeatedly vowed that they would never do so, and they probably wouldn’t have the votes to do it anyway. What they did instead on Monday was vote to support Graham’s authority as chairman of the Budget committee to use “current policy” in reconciliation.
Democrats were furious and said that Republicans were going “nuclear” by blowing up the filibuster rules. Many Senate Democrats have already come out in support of eliminating the filibuster outright, and the GOP’s latest moves are likely to evoke retaliation and hasten its demise in the coming years.
“Everybody ought to understand, this is the nuclear option. It’s just hidden behind a whole lot of Washington, D.C., lingo,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Sunday. “The only difference is, instead of pressing a big nuclear button right at the beginning of the Congress, Republicans decided that they’d hide behind a cloak of Senate procedure and go nuclear for every individual bill they want to pass on party lines.”
“There is no filibuster if the Senate R’s do this and when Dems take power there is no reason why we should not use reconciliation to pass immigration reform,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) added in a post online.
Other Democrats said their party should use the same parliamentary maneuver to pass long-sought priorities, including a single-payer national health care system like Medicare for All and a permanent expansion of the child tax credit. Democrats were only able to pass a one-year expansion of the child tax credit in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act partly because of the same reconciliation rules that Republicans ignored on Monday.