There’s an old nursery rhyme that applies to the never-ending and rancorous fight in Washington to get Trump’s Big, Beautiful tax bill through Congress. It goes something like this:
If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, what a wonderful world this would be.
IF only Republicans had replaced the Senate parliamentarian when they took majority control of the Senate in January, they could have attached at least $1 to $2 TRILLION more spending reductions and asset sales in the “reconciliation” bill.
I bet that you may not know who the Senate parliamentarian is, or even that this position exists.
But Elizabeth MacDonough does exist, and she’s become the most powerful person in Washington of late. She’s wreaking havoc on the Big Beautiful Tax Reconciliation Bill.
In the last several weeks MacDonough has ruled out some $2 trillion of budget savings and reforms – many of which are at the heart of the deficit reduction plan. She says they don’t comply with the esoteric budget process rules and can only be passed with a 60-vote Senate supermajority.
She ruled out the fix on Medicaid scams by the states, Medicaid citizen verification rules, land sales, the Reins Act to control regulatory costs, citizenship verification for welfare programs, restrictions on excessive pay for federal employees, reductions in funding for sanctuary cities, to name a few. She even ruled out a Medicaid fix that would have prohibited taxpayer funded sex change operations.
This has thrown a monkey wrench in the GOP plan to cut taxes and inflated the budget and the forecast for borrowing every year.
Thanks to McDonough, the budget deficit and the debt will be far HIGHER every year in the years to come.
Ironically, the very Democrats and interest groups who scream that Republicans are expanding the deficits and debt are applauding these fiscal roadblocks to control the debt and raise revenues to pay for spending. What hypocrisy.
Did I mention that the parliamentarian was appointed by…then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – a Democrat.
But McDonough is not at fault here. Republicans in the Congress are.
They could and should have retired her and inserted someone more amenable to the GOP agenda of downsizing government.
The parliamentarian served at the pleasure of the Senate, and the GOP has the majority.
Even worse, the Republicans on Capitol Hill should have cleaned house at the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation. Instead they buried their heads in the sand and let these unelected bureaucrats eviscerate their plans. Democrats rarely make these mistakes.
The CBO has come out with one of the craziest budget scores in history estimating some
$3 trillion in higher deficits with NO acknowledgement that the U.S. economy will grow much faster if we don’t have a $4 trillion tax hike in January. The CBO and Joint Tax Committee staffers could be fired for cause: they were $1.5 trillion wrong when they scored the first Trump tax bill. What’s the old saying: fool me twice, shame on ME.
This foolhardy oversight by Republicans to competent people on YOUR team in leadership positions is a reminder of the great former Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner’s Number one political rule: Personnel are policy.
It’s not too late to bring in a more accurate and fiscally conservative CBO and parliamentarian. President Trump correctly advises the Senate to overrule the parliamentarian and reinstate these vitally needed budget savings in the name of fiscal sanity.
He’s right. The problem is a lot of the damage has already been done.
Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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