House Republicans are taking up legislation that violates the budget framework they painstakingly negotiated in the spring. It’s not the end of the world for the megabill.
That’s because the majority almost always rules in the House, and lawmakers there are free to renege on prior agreements if they have the votes.
That likely means it’s curtains for the agreement brokered this spring by fiscal hawks, led by Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), who insisted on a mechanism tying the amount of tax cuts in the GOP megabill to the total amount of spending cuts.
But the sprawling domestic policy legislation that Senate Republicans sent to the House violates that mechanism. If Speaker Mike Johnson plows forward with the Senate plan, as he intends to do, any House member could theoretically raise a “point of order” pointing out that the legislation doesn’t adhere to budget adopted by the House.
There’s a catch: Unlike the Senate, which requires 60 votes to waive a budgetary point of order, the House can waive the procedural challenge with a simple majority.
Prompting a standalone vote on that waiver, however, would illustrate in broad daylight how House Republicans are simply ignoring their own framework, which was a product of months of negotiations between the far-right House Freedom Caucus, fiscal hawks on the House Budget Committee and Republican leadership.
Senate Republicans piled on far more tax cuts in their version of the megabill and likely didn’t include as much aggregate spending cuts as the House plan. According to one analysis by Andrew Lautz of the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Senate added $560 billion in new tax cuts compared with the House-passed bill. A final tranche of changes to the bill made on the Senate floor Tuesday further cut revenues by $20 billion while increased spending by $90 billion, adding to the fiscal violation.
House GOP leaders aren’t allowing a standalone vote, however. Rather, the “rule” Republican members are being asked to pass setting up final debate of the megabill specifies that the bill is to be considered “without intervention of any point of order.”
In other words: Tough luck, fiscal hawks.
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