No doubt the Republican senators who voted in support of the Democrats $1 trillion infrastructure bill think they demonstrated to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that the Senate can still compromise and work together, and thus elimination of the filibuster is unnecessary. And perhaps they’re right. It’s even possible that it was a political masterstroke, since the final infrastructure bill only includes around $250 billion in new spending.
If so, Republicans were able to do that because they had the leverage of the filibuster, and thus were able to demand reductions in the bill’s overall size and insist that at least part of the package be paid for. The Senate really did work.
But—and it’s a big but—here comes the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which the Democrats plan to jam through without any Republican votes at all.
Right about now you should be wondering why it is that Republican cooperation was necessary to pass the $1 trillion infrastructure bill but not the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. The answer is the Senate’s absurd budget reconciliation rule.
The budget reconciliation process was created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which Congress forced upon a weakened President Nixon less than a month before he resigned from office. It created a highly flawed federal budget process and has been a major contributor to the huge increase in federal spending since then. One of its biggest flaws was the creation of the optional Senate reconciliation process, which creates a “fast track” for spending bills by eliminating the possibility of filibuster and making it all but impossible to pass amendments.
The net effect of budget reconciliation is that the Senate requires 60 votes to pass something as mundane as naming a post office but can pass a $3.5 trillion spending bill on a simple majority vote. And the absurdity of it has never been more obvious than today, when a party with the thinnest of razor thin margins is planning to pass an enormous increase in spending that rivals the Great Society.
Such a dramatic change in policy and such an enormous growth in government simply shouldn’t be possible with a razor thin majority. Lyndon Johnson was able to pass his Great Society programs because the 1964 landslide Democratic victory gave him enormous majorities in both houses of Congress—with 68 Democrats in the Senate and 295 in the House. Whereas today, the Senate is tied, and Democrats have only a six-seat majority—the smallest since 1890.
Only something as absurd as Senate budget reconciliation could make it possible for such narrow majorities to force their will upon the nation. The Senate is supposed to be the “cooling saucer of democracy,” where legislation slows down and is carefully considered, as was the case with the infrastructure bill. Budget reconciliation actually turns the design of the Senate upside down, accelerating legislation and discouraging discussion and debate.
When Republicans next control Congress, a structural priority should be to fix these and other problems with the Congressional Budget Act. In the meantime, brace yourself for an enormous increase in the federal government and all of the tax increases it will inevitably require.