OPINION:
Senate squishes are watering down the president’s plan for America’s fiscal future. The Senate Finance Committee recently released its revision of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the House last month, and it’s not an improvement.
Conservatives already underwhelmed by the net savings in the lower chamber’s reconciliation measure aren’t happy about what the “world’s greatest deliberative body” has done with the legislation. “Yeah, I will not vote for this,” Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, wrote on X.
The Senate’s modifications will have to be approved in the House to become law, and the shameless extension of taxpayer subsidies for windmills and solar panels is causing turmoil. Instead of phasing out pork for the purveyors of intermittent energy sources over the next few years, liberal Republican senators insisted on extending Uncle Sam’s backing of many Green New Deal schemes through 2040.
That’s hard to swallow, but what matters is achieving the main objective: making President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. The Senate rewrite of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act does that.
Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, is eager to see the economic growth from the tax relief provisions. “We are excited to get this bill out on the floor,” he said Tuesday. “If you look at what happens if we don’t do this, the alternative isn’t a pretty one. I don’t think it’s a universe anyone wants to live in because it means a $4 trillion tax increase at the end of the year on the American people.”
He is working furiously to gather the votes needed to ram the bill through the Senate over the objection of every Democrat and no more than three members of his caucus. Sen. Susan M. Collins of Maine, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, remains one of the most prominent Republican holdouts, and her committee now has jurisdiction over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
She summoned White House budget chief Russ Vought to testify Wednesday about the administration’s rescission package, which would delete $9.4 billion in spending on wasteful foreign aid projects and National Public Radio. She also has problems with that bill.
Expect Mr. Vought to be grilled over his ideas on potentially using a “pocket rescission” to dodge senatorial dysfunction. Mr. Vought makes a powerful argument based on budgetary statutes and the Constitution that the president has the ultimate authority to exercise discretion when avoiding spending the public’s money unwisely.
A pocket rescission occurs if the White House notifies Congress of its intention to forgo expenditures 45 days before the end of the fiscal year. The appropriated funds would be canceled for good unless a congressional vote reverses the move, which is unlikely given the current congressional division.
If the White House takes this approach, it will likely be around August. President Ford pulled off this budgetary feat in 1975, but the tactic is rooted in a constitutional authority that every president before him applied all the way back to George Washington.
Despite the grumbles, the House and Senate will likely come together and send Mr. Trump a version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that he will sign. That’s only half the battle because Congress has so far proved incapable of shaking its chronic overspending habit.
Thankfully, Mr. Vought has a plan to break Washington’s addiction.
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