Piling Dishonesty on Top of Dishonesty

David Super

     Political differences are normal and healthy.  Sharp divergences in norms and in assessments of the facts will arise in times of great polarization.  Both are consistent with the functioning of a healthy democracy. 

     Rampant lying damages the fabric of democracy.  DOGE leader Elon Musk’s insistence that vast numbers of people were fraudulently receiving Social Security at implausible ages when that age entry was a default for missing data, or HHS Secretary Kennedy’s denials that his department has fired scientists when it has done so in droves, fractures the political community and makes respectful political discourse much more difficult.  President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s deliberate lies about Haitian immigrants even more directly fracture our political community, persuading their followers that we live in a Hobbesian war of all against all where democracy is impossible. 

     Perhaps by comparison, congressional Republicans’ machinations to pass their catastrophic budget reconciliation bill are tame.  Yet they also demonstrate the complete collapse of serious democratic discourse in the country.  When you openly contradict yourself, making claims that no thoughtful observer of any political stripe could accept, you express the utmost contempt not just for your opponents but for the electorate as a whole.  The message to voters is that either they are members of a minority that may be disregarded because it is powerless or they are so thoroughly enraptured by divisive rhetoric that they will not bother examining the facts.  And, indeed, the message to Republican Members of Congress is that their obedience is so thoroughly taken for granted that leadership sees no need to give them a credible position to defend.

     In 2017, when President Trump and congressional Republicans enacted a vast package of deficit-financed tax cuts tilted heavily toward the affluent, they tried to obscure the true cost to the country with phony expiration dates.  These directed the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation to assume that these costly tax cuts would disappear at the end of 2025 and have no further impact on the deficit.  Republicans never believed that the tax cuts would or should end at that time, but any extension would require further legislation with the deficit impact to be addressed at that time.

     Some months ago, however, Republicans announced that they would ignore the expiration dates from 2017 in estimates of this year’s legislation’s effect on the deficit.  In other words, well over a trillion dollars is being added to the national debt without being accounted for in estimates of either the 2017 tax bill or the current one.  One can only imagine Republicans’ shrieks of indignation should Democrats ever attempt such a stunt. 

     But now it turns out that congressional Republicans’ dishonesty is even worse than that.  Their current tax-cut package also contains new phony expiration dates:  expiration dates that lack any plausible policy justification and that the sponsors do not purport to intend take effect.  And Republicans are counting the deficit impact of this legislation as if those expiration dates are real at the very same time their estimates are treating the identical 2017 expiration dates as irrelevant.  The Congressional Budget Act and longstanding precedent are clear that expiration dates should be treated as real in estimating the cost of a bill, making their treatment of the 2017 expiration dates lawless and dishonest.  But now Republicans are not even saying that we should change our scorekeeping conventions going forward:  they are just adopting diametrically opposed positions at the same time to mislead journalists and the public about the size of the hole they are blowing in the federal budget. 

     Nor can this be chalked up to arcane maneuvering of which most Senate Republicans were unaware.  Senate Majority Leader Thune raised two points of order against his own bill on this basis only to have the Republican presiding officer rule that Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican Chair of the Budget Committee, can determine how he wants the bill’s costs to be estimated.  Democrats appealed those rulings and lost twice on party-line votes.  Not one of the supposed Republican “deficit hawks” had any problem with adding over $1 trillion to the national debt off the books. 

     For comparison, Democrats included an expiration date on the expanded Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan Act they enacted in early 2021 to solidify the country’s recovery from the Pandemic Recession.  They, too, wanted that credit to continue.  But they never questioned that the full cost of continuing current policy must be attributed to any legislation to extend it.  The cost of extending the Child Tax Credit was one of the major reasons why their Build Back Better proposal failed later that year.  Had the Democrats followed the maneuver that Republicans are here, extending the expanded Child Tax Credit would have been scored as “no cost”.  This was not an option, however, because the Democrats’ coalition includes numerous genuine deficit hawks and open government advocates who would not stand for such deception. 

     With the books now adequately cooked, the Senate has been proceeding with “vote-a-rama”, a long string of amendments decided after debates consisting of one minute each for sponsors and opponents.  This gives each party the chance to force opposing senators to cast difficult votes.  Of course, some Republicans could avoid that predicament by voting for appealing Democratic amendments. 

     To give his senators that option, Majority Leader Thune has been preparing a substitute amendment to be offered at the end of vote-a-rama.  This amendment will replace the entirety of the bill as amended up to then, including any Democratic amendments that Republicans accepted.  Thus the Senate’s votes on amendments are fake, too. 

     The Thune “king of the hill” amendment will represent the final text upon which the Senate will vote.  Democrats may demand that clerks read it out loud to give them time to read it, but they will have no time to debate it, and no estimates of its deficit impact or the number of people who will lose health care coverage.  I am always amused by Textualists’ complaints that nobody reads committee reports:  Senate (and House) procedures often ensure that nobody can read legislative text, either.

     Republicans can afford to lose three votes in each chamber of Congress.  Senator Rand Paul has said he is voting “no” because of the catastrophic deficit impact; Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said he would vote “no” because the bill’s Medicaid cuts would devastate the rural health care system in his home state.  (He was promptly forced to declare his retirement next year.) 

     In theory, that would mean that the Senate’s two moderate Republicans, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, could sink this ghastly bill.  Senator Murkowski certainly seems unhappy with the bill’s effect on health care and food assistance in her state, but Senator Collins has given every indication she will be voting “yes”.  Absent a clear sign to the contrary from Senator Collins, Senator Murkowski likely will do so, too, in exchange for some special provisions for Alaska.  This is frustrating to say the least as neither is realistically vulnerable to primary challenge:  Senator Murkowski already lost a primary to a far-right Republican and won her seat anyway as a write-in candidate, and no MAGA candidate would have a realistic chance of holding Maine for Republicans. 

     With a final Senate vote expected in the wee hours overnight, House Speaker Mike Johnson has called his Members into session for Tuesday, with the expectation of a final vote on Wednesday.  The two House Republicans to vote against the bill previously over its deficit impact have no reason to change their minds:  the Senate bill appears to be even worse. 

     This means that the bill could go down with the votes of only two of the supposedly moderate House Republicans.  Many of them vowed to vote “no” in the House unless clean energy credits were preserved.  The House bill gutted those credits but not one single moderate opposed the bill.  Some mumbled something about expecting the bill to get better in the Senate.  The Senate bill not only guts the clean energy credits (in a slightly more convoluted but no less effective way) but also establishes a new tax on wind and solar projects likely to devastate the industry.  The Senate Medicaid cuts are also even worse than those in the House.  If again no House “moderates” can find the courage to vote “no”, they may officially be labeled frauds.  But that would be just one more layer of dishonesty on top of an already tall pile.

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