Republicans brought a simmering debate over the cost of President Donald Trump‘s agenda to the Senate floor, raising a wonky but consequential question that could greenlight trillions in new spending.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) raised a point of order Sunday afternoon, just after clerks finished reading all 940 pages of Trump’s tax agenda. The motion was intended to establish that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the Budget Committee chairman, can set a “current policy baseline,” a novel accounting method that treats extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts as cost-free, but it was promptly challenged by the Democrats.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and his deputies raised a series of inquiries while warning that the budget tactic amounts to going “nuclear” on reconciliation, the budget process used to sidestep the Senate filibuster.
That debate won’t be settled formally until the start of a marathon voting session on the megabill, a hodge-podge of tax, border, and defense priorities. But the sparring deepens a bitter standoff that could change both the character and norms of the Senate.
If Republicans are successful, the majority party would have an easier time navigating reconciliation’s strict rules in future Congresses, particularly as it relates to its constraint on deficits. To date, Democrats have panned the tactic as a “budget gimmick” that upends precedent and ignores Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough.
“If this happens, we will all laugh you out of the room because we’ve never seen anything like this. We will not let anyone forget you’re trashing the rules in order to pass this egregious bill,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior Democrat and ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, said on the Senate floor.
Schumer said the point of the inquiries was to “show the hypocrisy of what Republicans are trying to do here in the Senate, and to expose how they’re trying to hide the true costs of their billionaire giveaways to the American people.”
Republicans, who are using the accounting method to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, maintain that the megabill will pay for itself through economic growth and have touted the over $1 trillion in spending reductions brokered as part of the legislation. The Congressional Budget Office released updated deficit projections over the weekend, finding the Senate version would add $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
The floor debate marks the latest flare-up over the accounting method. Democrats requested a meeting with Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, a nonpartisan arbiter of Senate rules, on Saturday afternoon to discuss the current policy baseline with Republicans, but Graham declined the meeting.
Taylor Reidy, a spokeswoman for Graham, said in a statement that the budget chairman, not the parliamentarian, gets to decide whether a current policy baseline is permitted for the megabill.
“There is nothing to debate and we consider this matter settled,” Reidy said on Sunday.
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Republican staff also circulated a report Sunday from 2022, in which then-Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) stated the committee “makes the call on questions of numbers.”
On the floor, Graham insisted there was precedent for using a different baseline, before pivoting to a speech defending the contents of the legislation.