Senate Republicans are on the cusp of formally adopting a controversial accounting tactic to zero out much of the cost of their massive domestic policy bill.
The matter came to a head on the Senate floor Sunday afternoon, when Democrats sought to prevent the use of the current policy baseline, as the tactic is known. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer objected to the maneuver and accused Republicans of setting a new precedent with the “budgetary gimmick.”
The Senate is set to vote on Schumer’s objection later Sunday or Monday, but Republicans believe their members will back up Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
That’s in part because they were able to sidestep a situation where senators would be asked to overrule Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough on the baseline question. Instead, Republicans are asserting that Graham has the ability to establish which baseline is used under the 1974 law governing the budget process, rather than having MacDonough issue a formal ruling.
“There is nothing to debate and we consider this matter settled,” Graham spokesperson Taylor Reidy said.
The revised baseline allows Republicans to essentially write off the $3.8 trillion cost of extending tax cuts passed in 2017 that are set to expire at the end of the year. The effect on the megabill’s bottom line is profound as a pair of new Congressional Budget Office reports show.
One, released late Saturday night using the current policy baseline, showed the legislation would reduce the deficit by $508 billion. The other, released Sunday morning using the traditional method accounting for expiring provisions, showed the megabill would increase the deficit by $3.25 trillion.
“Things have never, never worked this way where one party so egregiously ignores precedent, process and the parliamentarian, and does that all in order to wipe away trillions of dollars in costs,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said during a speech on the Senate floor Sunday.
The maneuver came as little surprise. The GOP plan has been quietly in the works for months, and Thune had suggested they would reprise the no-formal-ruling strategy they’d used earlier in the process of passing the megabill.
“As we did on the budget resolution, we believe the law is clear that the budget committee chairman can determine the baseline we use,” Thune told reporters. Graham on Sunday embraced the CBO ruling showing the deficit savings — and his own authority to make the accounting change: “I’ve decided to use current policy when it comes to cutting taxes,” he said. “If you use current policy, they never expire.”
The baseline change is crucial for Senate Republicans because under the budget blueprint they adopted earlier this year, the Finance Committee provisions in the bill can only increase the deficit by a maximum of $1.5 trillion. The bill now under consideration wouldn’t comply under the old accounting method.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Finance Democrat, called it “budget math as fake as Donald Trump’s tan,” and said the GOP amounted to a “nuclear” choice that would weaken the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster.
“We’re now operating in a world where the filibuster applies to Democrats but not to Republicans, and that’s simply unsustainable given the triage that’ll be required whenever the Trump era finally ends,” he said.
