A Budgetary Boomerang for the GOP

After the Senate filibuster barely survived a Democratic majority in the upper chamber, the emerging question is whether the tradition of unlimited debate will survive under GOP control. That, at least, is the proposition advanced by the New York Times. It frets that Republican maneuvering over President Trump’s legislative agenda “is making an end run around the filibuster” via “procedural sleight of hand.”This alleged prestidigitation, in the Times’ telling, is “alarming members of both parties,” though few Republicans appear willing to voice their concerns on the record. One exception is Senator Murkowski of Alaska, who asks if the procedural wrangling under way in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body is undermining the principles of the filibuster: “Does this take us to a place where we have eroded that aspect of the rule that has really kept us upright?”The furor over the filibuster centers on a process used to get budget bills passed in a timely fashion in the famously factious chamber. It’s known as budget reconciliation. It allows for tax and spending measures to proceed through the Senate with only a majority vote. Just about all other measures in the Senate are subject, at every step in the legislative process, to unlimited speechifying, to cut off from which requires 60 votes.To see how that rule can gum up the works, feature the marathon 25-hour talkathon last week by Senator Booker. He broke the record set by Senator Thurmond. While Thurmond was trying to delay civil rights legislation, making his logorrhea an actual filibuster, Mr. Booker was merely moralizing. It underscores the extent that individual solons can hold up action in the chamber almost indefinitely, unless 60 Senators agree to cut off debate.The wrinkle in the current budget reconciliation is the concern being raised by Democrats, and some Republicans, that the GOP is bending the rules to get Mr. Trump’s tax cuts through the Senate. The reconciliation rules are, per the Times, “meant to ensure that the legislation in question will not add to the deficit.” The decider on that head is typically the Senate’s parliamentarian, but the GOP is weighing making the call on its own.These columns have chronicled the feud on Capitol Hill over whether to account for a renewal of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts as an expense. Claims that the tax cuts will “cost” anything, we contend, “have it backwards.” That’s because “citizens bear the ‘cost’ of taxes — not Uncle Sam.” So it’s logical for the GOP to frame the extension of the Trump tax cuts as a deficit-neutral measure, as we said, “because it costs the government nothing to lower tax rates.” Republicans call that approach the “current policy baseline.” Critics want to designate the tax cuts as an expense to the tune of some $4 trillion over 10 years. Adopting that view would require, per the reconciliation process, spending offsets in the budget bill. If the parliamentarian sides with those critics, some Senate Republicans are planning on “sidestepping the parliamentarian altogether,” the Times reports. The GOP bill “violates the rules,” Senator Merkley reckons, “so now Republicans want to get rid of those rules.” Republicans, the Times reports, wave off such objections, averring that “they are acting well within the budgetary law.” The majority leader, Senator Thune, a vocal defender of unlimited debate, says it’s “touching” to see the Democrats pose as fiscal watchdogs and defenders of the filibuster that liberal solons, as recently as 2022, sought to eliminate.Even so, Republicans will want to tread warily before chipping away at the tradition of loquacity. After Senator Reid in 2013 ended the filibuster on presidential nominations, it came back to haunt the Democrats when the GOP used it to get Supreme Court justices through by majority vote. The filibuster helps preserve the Senate as a “necessary fence,” as Madison put it, against “fickleness and passion.” Weakening it could boomerang for the GOP.

A Budgetary Boomerang for the GOP

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