Why the Republican Megabill Matters
Setting the table for the reconciliation fight.
I’ve come to believe that the Senate filibuster is the central fact around which everything else in American political life revolves.
By “filibuster,” I’m referring here to the requirement that a piece of legislation receives 60 votes to advance in the U.S. Senate. (When a bill doesn’t, it is said to have been “filibustered,” using a term that has its roots in the Dutch word for “pirate.”) That 60-vote threshold is rarely reached, at least for hot-button measures, which has helped give rise to so many of the trends that have turned our political climate upside down.
The resulting congressional gridlock has fueled widespread frustration with Washington’s inability to get much done, helping create an environment of anger, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment that sparked political movements like Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’.
It has resulted in the gradual expansion of presidential power, as members of Congress — in a process of learned helplessness — happily fork over their own authority, and presidents begin to view executive action as their only way to enact important changes.
And it has led to Congress — and then the rest of Washington — descending into little more than political theater, since members come to believe there is little point in legislating with the filibuster standing in their way, so they might as well court clicks and headlines instead. Without the reasonable expectation that a political system can enact lasting policy change, everything starts to go a little berserk.
That said, my point here isn’t that the filibuster should be abolished. Considering the eternal moodiness of the American electorate, I’m very open to the possibility that such a change would make things even worse, moving the dial from no policy change all the way to extreme policy chaos, with huge chunks of our statutory fabric being repealed and then revived every four years. It’s hard to run a country where the tax rates, say, are constantly fluctuating up and down, or where Medicare for All is introduced and then abolished and then brought back. That’s a recipe for economic disaster.
But before we even think of addressing the issue — perhaps not by abolishing the roadblock, but reforming it, by lowering the threshold from 60 votes to 55 and seeing if that helps grease the legislative skids — we have to name it. One of the weirdest parts of our government by filibuster is that we rarely even discuss the rule outside of high school civics classes and, when we do, almost no one consistently defends it.
Instead, legislating has become a game of inches, where the party in power tries to chip away at the filibuster in little ways, the party out of power insists on defending it, and then as soon as their positions in Washington switch, so do their stances.1
And, in the meantime, we’ve settled into a bizarre equilibrium where we all agree that the governing party gets a single exception every year, where they can enact a dizzying array of policy changes just that once2 (as long as it obeys an obscure set of rules and limitations), and then afterwards, we go back to majorities in Congress not being able to do much. Clearly, no one believes in the sanctity of the 60-vote threshold very strongly if they also believe they can occasionally violate it; what’s odd is that everyone has just accepted that each party gets its one annual violation, while simultaneously claiming it would be incredibly destructive to modify the threshold itself.
(You might think that Democrats had broken this pattern when they came two votes away from advancing filibuster reform in 2022, but nope, they’re right back to claiming that a party-line vote to change Senate rules in order to give more power to a simple majority would mark “a dramatic break from Senate precedent with profound institutional consequences,” even though they tried to do exactly that three years ago.)
But back to our (un)happy medium of the one annual “get-out-of-the-filibuster-free” card, which is better known as a “reconciliation” bill. If your eyes glaze over you when you see that word, they shouldn’t. Instead of your mind immediately jumping to “boring, complicated process,” you should read it as “the governing party’s best chance at enacting lasting change.”
President Trump’s executive orders routinely receive more attention than the reconciliation process, which is currently playing out on the Hill, but many of his orders will be overturned by the courts and almost all will be overturned by the next Democratic president.
Anything Trump does that will have a lasting effect3 will be done by an act of Congress, which is why you should be paying close attention to the reconciliation process, which is the rare act of Congress that can pass along party lines. This, not an executive order, marks the Republican Party’s best opportunity between now and the midterm elections to put a stamp on American tax, border, energy, and defense policy.
Obamacare, or at least the final parts of it, was done by reconciliation. So was the attempt to repeal it. So were the 2017 tax cuts. So were Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act. As I’ve written previously, the creators of the reconciliation process did not intend to produce a giant loophole presidents could use to squeeze through the most impactful pieces of legislation of their term. But that’s where we’ve landed anyways.
I say all this by way of introduction, because you’re about to see a lot more reconciliation coverage over the next few weeks, now that the process is really kicking into gear.
Republicans are getting close to finalizing a first draft of their “one, big beautiful bill,” as it’s being called — no, seriously, look at the title of the tax portion of the package — with each committee in the House currently writing up how they think their part of the legislation should look.
So far, eight House committees have approved their reconciliation offerings, with the final three committees set to vote on their portions of the bill today: Ways and Means (the panel with jurisdiction over taxes), Energy and Commerce, and Agriculture.
We will be doing a much more detailed deep dive as the bill continues to come together, but to give you an idea of what the legislation will include, here’s some of what committees have approved so far:
$140 billion in border security spending, including $50 billion to build 700 more miles of a border wall.
$150 billion in defense spending, including $25 billion to create a “Golden Dome” to shield against ballistic, hypersonic and advanced cruise missiles.
Reinstating quarterly onshore oil and gas lease sales, as well as new offshore lease sales in the Gulf of America and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Slashing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau budget by more than 60%.
And here are the provisions that are set to be considered in the three remaining committees today:
Permanently extending the tax cuts for individuals from Trump’s 2017 tax law.
No tax on tips or overtime pay, two provisions Trump campaigned on (though both are only structured to last until 2028).
New requirements that Medicaid recipients between the ages of 19 to 64 work, volunteer, or go to school for at least 80 hours a month.
Passing on some of the cost of food stamps to states, using a sliding scale by which states with higher rates of improper payments would have to pay more.
A tax hike for wealthy universities, with the current 1.4% tax on their net investment incomes being upped as high as 21% for some schools.
The creation of “MAGA Accounts,” investment accounts for children, which parents could put up to $5,000 into annually — and into which the government would contribute $1,000 for accounts of children born between 2024 and 2028.
Phasing out most of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, including for electric vehicles.
An increase to the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, which is currently capped at $10,000 and would be hiked up to $30,000.
A $4 trillion increase to the debt ceiling.
When you see the phrase “reconciliation package” or “Republican megabill” or the “one, big beautiful bill,” all of those bullet points should pop into your head as the type of major policy changes that are being suggested by those few words.
As we’ll discuss in the next few days, several of the points on those lists — particularly the second one — are controversial within the Republican Party.
If a vote was being held tomorrow, the bill as written would not pass. In the House, a number of blue-state Republicans want the SALT deduction cap — the amount of one’s state tax payments you can deduct from your federal tax bill — raised even higher. Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) called himself a “hell no” on the $30,000 cap; Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) also signaled opposition to the current draft.
On the other end of the party’s spectrum, conservative Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has said that the proposed changes to Medicaid are not dramatic enough, although any more sweeping changes would risk threatening moderate support.
Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) penned a New York Times op-ed yesterday warning against Medicaid cuts, although he did not specifically address the changes proposed in the House, which could likely lead to millions of people losing their benefits.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), writing in the Wall Street Journal, said that the package is poised to add too much to the deficit to earn his support. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has said he will vote against such a large increase to the debt ceiling.
In the coming weeks, there will be frenzied efforts to amend the package to win over these dissenters: Republicans can only afford three defectors in the House, and four in the Senate, and there are several more with hesitations than I just named.
In a government run by filibuster — except when it isn’t — a party only gets so many chances to, well, actually do things, which puts incredible pressure on each individual reconciliation bill. That’s why so much has been stuffed into this one measure, instead of debating each of these disconnected policy priorities separately. Paradoxically, the filibuster — often referred to as the ultimate vanguard of deliberation — denies us the luxury of giving each of these issues their due consideration.
This dynamic is a loss for deliberative democracy, but it often works to the advantage of party leaders, who can construct packages that are “too big too fail.” The hope is that, even if the package includes some changes various members won’t approve of it, it will include even more that Republican members can’t afford to vote against.
With such tight margins, though, that’s a tricky gambit: putting all your faith in “one big bill” ensures that, for every day a handful of Republicans aren’t yet persuaded that the good in the bill outweighs the bad, the party will be stuck without a legislative record.
The most obvious example of this is on nominations, where Democrats got rid of the filibuster for all nominees except to the Supreme Court in 2013, to Republican outcry, and then Republicans did the same for nominees to the Supreme Court in 2017, to Democratic outcry. Joe Manchin was the only senator who voted against both changes.
Well, once a fiscal year, which can be twice a calendar year.
Although, of course, things done by reconciliation bill can be undone by reconciliation bill, so nothing is truly permanent. However, it’s harder to undo changes enshrined into law — as seen in Republican struggles to repeal Obamacare and the party’s current split over how much of the Inflation Reduction Act to overturn. But certainly not impossible: some large portions of the IRA are guaranteed to be undone by the Republican megabill.
Why are you using "Gulf of America" when the international accepted name is "Gulf of Mexico"?
Gabe, "anyways" is not acceptable in place of "anyway". At least to the grammar and usage nags. Picky, picky.