Senate Republicans are on track to pass their revised budget blueprint after voting last night to kick off debate on the plan — a key step toward their goal of enacting trillions of dollars in tax and spending cuts.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to oppose moving ahead with the plan in Thursday’s 52-48 vote, which sets up a potential all-night “vote-a-rama” on a host of amendments before a final vote. Democrats have been railing against the Republican plan, arguing that it will help billionaires and hurt families, but they don’t have the votes to block it.
What’s in the Republican resolution: The Senate GOP framework, as we outlined yesterday, zeroes out the cost of permanently renewing tax cuts enacted in 2017 and set to expire at the end of this year. It also allows for another $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts and would increase the debt limit by $5 trillion. On the spending side, the resolution calls for $150 billion in additional defense funding, $175 billion for border enforcement and $20 billion for Coast Guard modernization. It calls for a minimum of $4 billion in spending cuts, far less than the roughly $2 trillion that House conservatives want.
Budget experts warn against the plan: Fiscal hawks have also slammed the Senate resolution, warning that it tries to hide the cost of renewing the 2017 tax cuts by dismissing it as simply an extension of “current policy.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the plan would allow up to $5.8 trillion in added deficits over 10 years — more than the 2017 tax cuts, the 2020 pandemic response CARES Act, the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law combined. The plan could add as much as $60 trillion in extra debt through 2055.
“It’s impossible to overstate how destructive this budget proposal could become for our fiscal path and the very foundations of the budget process itself,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas said in a statement that also called the spending details “an unmitigated disgrace.”
A dozen budget experts from across the policy spectrum issued a joint warning Friday about the Republican approach, which they warned can easily be gamed, destroying credible cost estimates and responsible budgeting.
“The most fundamental rule of budget enforcement is that any expected fiscal impact is counted and recognized,” they wrote. “Ignoring official cost estimates to instead invent numbers breaks that rule, and no Congress has ever done so to prevent trillions of dollars of fiscal impact from ever being scored or enforced.”
What’s next: The vote-a-rama on potentially dozens of amendments is expected tonight, and Democrats can force an unlimited number of votes on politically fraught issues. “Senate Democrats will come to the floor to put the Republican agenda on trial before the court of public opinion,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said. “We will explain the devastating consequences and highlight the many injustices that Republicans will inflict on people’s health, on their financial security, on their children’s future, and, in fact, on the very future of the American Dream itself.”
Still, a final vote on the resolution itself will likely come by Saturday morning. The House will then have to take up the resolution and resolve a range of members’ concerns, though action on that side of the Capitol is stalled for now due to a standoff over proxy voting for new parents.