This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Senate Republicans have passed a budget resolution that sets in motion their plan for gigantic tax cuts, skewed heavily toward billionaires, and that heralds their intent to pass it by breaking the budget rules. In order to cloak the massive increase in the deficit that would come along with skewed tax cuts, the resolution cheated. The first tranche would extend the temporary 2017 tax cuts, the proudest accomplishment of President Trump’s first term, which are set to expire this year, and another tranche would lay the groundwork to grant his wish to make his tax cuts permanent, that is, to make trillions more in skewed tax cuts after 2034.
As this plan advances, Senate Republicans are not passively looking the other way and doing nothing as they are with Trump’s tariffs. Rather, the Republican Senate is trampling its most basic budget strictures to swell the public debt for many years to come. After the budget resolution passed 51-48 this week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who voted for it, wrote on X that “there are serious shortcomings within this resolution that gave me considerable pause.” She said these “include the adoption of a current policy baseline . . . [and] the setting of a path that will result in more than $50 trillion in federal debt within a decade . . . .” That $50 trillion figure put a number on the cost of making the Trump tax cuts permanent.
This is only the beginning of the rule-breaking. As this package continues through the rest of the budget process, it may presage Senate Republican willingness to break Senate rules about requirements for 60 votes to pass other legislation too. If Senate Republicans can pass the permanent tax cuts with a slim 50 votes in support, they may assert the power to move other radical MAGA measures on that same bare majority.
Here’s how they’ve gone about this so far: In order to get the tax cuts through the Senate in a way that circumvents a Democratic filibuster — so, in a way that requires only a bare, 50-vote majority, not the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster — Republicans are using a process known as “budget reconciliation.” The Senate Republicans apparently could not face scoring all these trillions in tax cuts as increases in the deficit. So, rather than being transparent, they pulled off the first stage of a two-stage maneuver to first bend and then break the rules. The Senate Budget Committee manufactured a gimmick that apparently eased the consciences of more fiscal-minded senators who might have balked at an initial honest accounting of a deficit of $4 trillion. A budget measures deficits from a “baseline.” The chair of the committee, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), asserted the power to engage in a “current policy baseline” for the budget resolution. This mild-sounding trick meant taking the “current policy” — Trump’s temporary 2017 cuts — as the “baseline.” That sleight of hand would mean that extending the cuts would not be deemed to be cuts which add to the deficit, but just more of the current (albeit temporary) policy, meaning, following the make-believe math, it would not add to the deficit.
Initially, it was expected that this trick would come to an early ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough. That could have turned ugly, because if she ruled against it, Senate Republicans would have to vote to overrule her and some would balk at that raw breach of the rules. Instead, the Senate Budget Committee plugged the phony “current policy” baseline into the budget resolution, and bypassed the parliamentarian, asserting that Graham had, for now, the power to make the determination himself and did not need a ruling from the parliamentarian. So much for that rule, and so much for the integrity of the Congress as an institution.
The skewed Budget Resolution then passed the Senate on April 5. The House passed it on April 10. Now, the Senate will then have a period of time to work on reconciliation. Eventually, the Senate may come back to that potentially ugly moment of overruling the parliamentarian. The budget resolution is a short concurrent resolution, not a tax law. It sets the stage and commands that the rest of the process go forward.
Then the Senate (and the House) must pass the tax cuts in the form of a law (the “budget reconciliation law”). That law will come to the Senate floor for a vote. Nothing is certain in advance in the world of Republican congressional budgeting, but one may consider that the Senate parliamentarian may make a ruling about that law. Namely, the parliamentarian will rule whether the permanent Trump tax cuts in it, notwithstanding the claim of “current policy baselines,” violate a very important budget procedure rule known as the Byrd Rule. (I wrote of the role of the Senate parliamentarian in the Budget Act, notably in the “Byrd Rule,” in Congressional Practice and Procedure 893 (1989).) That rule dates back to the 1980s. It is meant to preclude using the slim 50 vote path of reconciliation to enact tax cuts outside the ten year period set by the Budget Act as the window for reconciliation action. That precludes tax cuts now for after 2034.
If MacDonough were to advise the Chair that the rule is being violated, Majority Leader Thune would then turn to his 53 Republican senators and ask them to vote to overrule her. Will they? Will they overrule her? It is more likely he can assemble the 50 votes he needs at that late point, than if the issue had been put before the Senate in the last few weeks, much earlier in their consideration of the budget resolution.
Now, by the point MacDonough weighs in, the 53 Republican senators will have spent months bargaining among themselves over the shape of the tax cuts — and the spending cuts in the same bill. Each and every Republican senator will have been offered an opportunity to weigh in, and to seek to get things the way they want. They will understand how important it is for most of them to use that powerful tool for cheating, namely the current policy baseline. And, of course, they will have come to understand how important it is to Trump to make his tax cuts permanent.
Once Trump has succeeded in taking the Republican Senate down the path of overruling the parliamentarian as to the permanent tax cut, he may continue on that path. A slim, 50-vote majority of Republican senators could be used, for instance, to break Democratic filibusters if they were willing to overrule the parliamentarian and allow majority cloture on a particular bill. That is how the Senate chose to break filibusters on judicial nominations.
So, after a vote to have 50 votes pass permanent Trump tax cuts, they might go on to give Trump other bills. Who can say at this point which those would be? Permanently eliminating the Department of Education? Attacking birthright citizenship? Both of these are steps that would be much stronger by legislation than by mere executive order, but would face Democratic filibuster.
Even without looking that far down the path, the Republican Senate has already gone very far by breaking the bars to let loose the danger of the “current policy baseline.” It is an understatement to say that we will be paying for it for a very long time.
