WASHINGTON — The Senate Thursday blocked an effort by Democrats to preserve their ability to raise roadblocks in front of a $1.5 trillion GOP tax cut plan later this year.
The 52-47 vote kept a $4 trillion budget plan on track to pass late Thursday. The measure would set the stage for tax legislation later this year that could pass through the Senate without fear of a filibuster by Democrats — and add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
President Donald Trump weighed in Thursday, telling reporters that “I think we have the votes for the budget which will be phase one of our massive tax cuts and reform.”
Only one Republican senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, has expressed opposition to the budget, which shelves GOP deficit concerns in favor of the party’s tax cut drive.
The upcoming tax measure, always a top item on the GOP agenda this year, has taken on even greater urgency with the failure of the party to carry out its longstanding promise to repeal former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the tax-writing Finance Committee, offered the amendment to try to take away the ability of Republicans to muscle through subsequent tax legislation without any Democratic votes, saying tax reform should be bipartisan — as was the tax reform effort signed into law by former President Ronald Reagan three decades ago.
“It’s just the opposite of the kind of approach Ronald Reagan and Democrats used in 1986,” Wyden said. “It’s going to polarize us rather than bring us together.”
The House passed its version of the budget last week. It calls for tax cuts that don’t add to the deficit and would pair the tax rewrite measure with $200 billion in spending cuts over the coming decade. Both plans seek to crack open a longstanding ban on oil and gas exploration in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Under Capitol Hill’s byzantine budget rules, the nonbinding budget resolution is supposed to lay out a long-term fiscal framework for the government. This year’s measure, for instance, calls for $473 billion in cuts from Medicare over 10 years and more than $1 trillion from Medicaid. All told, Senate Republicans would cut spending by more than $5 trillion over a decade, though they don’t attempt to spell out where the cuts would come from.
If the measure’s politically difficult cuts were implemented, the budget deficit would drop to $424 billion after 10 years and average about $540 billion a year over the life of the plan, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Republicans use different math, relying on optimistic predictions of economic growth that average 2.6 percent a year — while ignoring growing, chronic deficits run by Social Security — to claim that their budget could actually generate a surplus by 2026.
GOP leaders appear to have rounded up the votes to pass the plan late Thursday.