News: Senate Budget Committee Republicans are planning to begin a series of meetings over the next few weeks with the Senate parliamentarian’s office on budget reconciliation, according to sources familiar with the plans.
The GOP’s goal is to get guidance on the “current policy baseline” in early April. That information could be critical to writing the tax portion of Republicans’ reconciliation package.
This baseline is a relatively untested scoring method that Senate Republican leaders want to use to make the Trump tax cuts permanent in their reconciliation bill.
The baseline would essentially say it costs nothing to extend the 2017 tax cuts that expire this year, rather than the more than $4.5 trillion price tag under Congress’ typical tax scoring methods.
That would help get around Senate reconciliation rules that require everything to be paid for after the first 10 years in reconciliation. Republicans don’t view the amount of budgetary offsets they’d need to cover the tax cuts after 10 years as politically viable.
But as we mentioned, this scoring method hasn’t been used in reconciliation before, which has House Republicans on edge. They want better assurances that it won’t run into problems with Senate rules down the line, so what Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has to say will be crucial.
MacDonough won’t give ironclad rulings at this stage of the reconciliation process. But the Budget Committee can get an informal sense of how she views different options.
When it comes to the baseline, there are other challenges, too. Key House Republicans have also warned that deficit hawks may not go for it if the Senate lowers the budget blueprint’s $1.5 trillion floor for spending cuts.
Senate Republicans are expected to focus heavily on reconciliation plans in the upcoming work period — a three-week stretch before the April recess for Easter and Passover.
