Chuck Schumer says that the Senate parliamentarian has expanded the scope of the body’s reconciliation process.
Chuck Schumer says that the Senate parliamentarian has expanded the scope of the body’s reconciliation process. Vox reports:
Senate Democrats just got some wonky procedural news that has some pretty big implications for President Joe Biden’s agenda.
On Monday night, the Senate parliamentarian — an in-house rules expert — determined that Democrats would be able to do a third budget reconciliation bill this year, a massive development that gives lawmakers more room to pass legislation without Republican support.
Already, Democrats had the ability to do two budget reconciliation bills: one focused on fiscal year 2021 and one focused on fiscal year 2022. Unlike most other bills, budget measures can pass with just 51 votes, instead of 60, which means Democrats are able to usher through the legislation they want if all 50 members of their caucus are onboard. (With the American Rescue Plan, for instance, 50 Democrats were able to approve the $1.9 trillion package as part of the FY2021 budget bill, even though no Republicans backed it.)
Presuming that Schumer is telling the truth, I will dislike this development because I would like to see the reconciliation process narrowed rather than expanded. Nevertheless, I’m not entirely sure that this change really does have especially “big implications for President Joe Biden’s agenda.” Are the politics of taxing and spending really contingent upon how many bites Democrats get at the apple? Will this rule change alter the fundamental dynamics that undergird what is and isn’t possible in this Congress?
One of the arguments I have heard in support of this claim is that the Democrats will now have the chance to break up their infrastructure bill into two tranches, where before they would have been limited to one. Under this plan, the first bill would contain the easier-to-pass “hard” infrastructure provisions and the second bill would contain the harder-sell provisions — i.e., the provisions that aren’t actually “infrastructure” by any normal definition. Certainly, one can see how this approach would help the first bill get through more easily: Instead of shoving everything into one vehicle and bullying the skeptics into voting for a package deal, Schumer could simply push through the attractive stuff with a promise to return to the tough stuff in a few months. What is less obvious, though, is how this would help the second bill pass. Surely, if the Manchins and Testers of the world get what they want the first time around, they will have fewer incentives to jump on board with the next bid?
The same problem applies to taxes. It is certainly possible that the Democrats could split their coveted tax increases across two or more bills. But that won’t change the numbers. And, while it is possible to imagine Democrats benefitting politically from splitting the big numbers into two (half a trillion sold twice may sound more attractive than a trillion sold once), it is also possible to imagine the Republican Party benefitting from being able to say, quite truthfully, that the Democrats have raised taxes twice in a single year. (This would be especially damaging to vulnerable members in the House of Representatives, who, by definition, would also have to go along with the ruse.) At the moment it may seem as if we are on a never-ending spending binge — and that nobody cares too much about the consequences — but, eventually, there is going to be a political cost attached to the perception that the Democrats are spending trillions of dollars over and over and over again. For now, pretending that their preexisting agenda is actually “COVID relief” or “overdue infrastructure spending” is working fine. It will not work forever, though. In Washington, there are costs to doing anything, and it is not at all obvious that breaking up an expansive agenda into pieces reduces those costs in any meaningful way.