FIVE POINTS: Your Thanksgiving Briefing Book
1. Remember these charts when you engage at Thanksgiving. My family is not particularly hard to talk politics with, and I *still* spend some time prepping for Thanksgiving political conversations. Your job is to steer your conversation away from flashpoints and toward interesting discussions. Follow these handy charts of mine as guides to thinking about where you do and don't want to be:
The safest topic, in my experience, is often local politics. And education is almost never going to start a fight.
2. The tax bill has some real twists ahead of it in the Senate. On Thursday, the House passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, by a vote of 227-205. Also on Thursday, the plain-language mark of the Senate version of the bill was ordered reported from the Senate Finance committee. The next step is the Senate floor, presumably sometime after Thanksgiving. I suspect there may be some problems.
The tax bill is losing popular appeal. The latest polling on the bill shows popular support for the GOP plan has declined significantly, indicating that the GOP may have lost control of the public framing of the bill.
The GOP boxed themselves in with the budget resolution. The need to use the budget reconciliation process (see below) in order to do majoritarian tax reform required the GOP to specify the maximum amount the legislation could reduce revenue over the next ten years. They chose $1.5 trillion. Perhaps they were constrained by the optics of that number, but it turns out that it's too low to easily cover all of the tax reforms they'd like to make. So now they are looking around for ways to save money or reduce tax cuts. This is a total unforced error; they could have just written $2.5 trillion into the budget resolution.
Adding the repeal of the individual mandate makes this thoroughly partisan . One way to save money is to add the repeal of the individual mandate to the bill, which they did. The problem with this move is that it probably unites the Democrats against the bill. Whereas previously it was possible that the GOP might have found a handful of Democratic votes, they are now going to have to rely exclusively on a partisan strategy.
There are Republicans already complaining about the bill. Senator Ron Johnson (WI) came out against the current form of the bill this week. Senator Susan Colllins (ME) is not particularly thrilled with the plan. Senator James Lankford (OK) has raised concerns about the deficit consequences. Senator Lisa Murkowski now wants the Murray-Alexander health compromise passed before she'll vote for the tax bill. And the three retiring GOP Senators---John McCain (AZ), Jeff Flake (AZ), and Bob Corker (TN)---are all wild cards who have previously used their freedom from the electoral process to buck the party. With 52 seats in the Senate, the GOP does not have much of a cushion to work with. In addition, if Doug Jones defeats Roy Moore in the Alabama special election on December 12, they may be down another seat.
This all spells some degree of trouble for the bill. On the other hand, there seems to be a general belief among the Republicans that they need to pass something; having already failed to repeal Obamacare, there's a conventional wisdom that failing on tax reform would leave the GOP with nothing to show the voters in 2018, hurting the party brand. That urgency may be enough to get a tax bill across the finish line. But it would not surprise me if the GOP ultimately resorts to a simpler tax cut and walks away from the larger reform plan.
3. The budget process is really the *whole* process right now. The congressional budget process is a complicated set of laws, chamber rules, and precedents. It's not a exaggeration to say it is shaping almost everything Congress is doing right now. First, it is having a huge impact on tax reform. Republicans chose to pursue tax reform through the reconciliation process, so they could avoid a Senate filibuster. This creates all sorts of limitations on the scope of the legislation. As mentioned above, it required them to set a maximum amount of revenue loss, which has them scrambling for savings. It also requires the bill to not increase the deficit beyond the 10-year window, which has led them to sunset many of the tax cuts for individuals.
Second, the budget process is setting up a high-stakes bargain between the parties in December. The current continuing resolution (CR) for FY2018 appropriations expires on December 8th, so Congress will need to either pass spending bills by then or resort to another temporary CR. In any case, appropriations can be filibustered in the Senate, so any final settlement needs bipartisan support. The Budget Control Act, however, has set statutory caps for total defense and non-defense discretionary spending, right now $549B and $519B respectively. Everyone agrees these caps need to be raised, but no one agrees how much to raise them by.
Right now, Democrats are insisting on parity between defense and non-defense. The GOP wants less non-defense. Budget hawks will certainly seek cuts in mandatory spending in exchange for agreeing to any increase in the caps.Due to the bargaining leverage created by the budget/appropriations process, immigration policy fights may also ride on these negotiations. The Democrats want DACA. The Republicans want border security funding. There's obviously a deal to be struck there, but getting to it may be harder than it appears. And since inaction on the appropriations will lead to a government shutdown, the negotiations will inevitably operate in an atmosphere of brinksmanship.
The Democrats also have some risky political choices to make within the budget process. The tax bill is almost certainly going to violate the PAYGO law, which requires OMB to sequester mandatory spending on Medicare and certain other entitlements if Congress passes deficit-increasing legislation without offsetting it. Some budgetary accounting tricks can be used to get around this, but the most obvious path forward is for Congress to pass legislation exempting the tax bill from PAYGO. But that can't be done via reconciliation, so the GOP will need 60 votes to do it. Do the Democrats dare block such a bill, and allow the tax bill to create billions in cuts to Medicare and other programs? Probably not. But they could. Similarly, do the Democrats play hardball on the Budget Control Act caps or DACA, even if it means a government shutdown?
4. If Moore wins in Alabama, I'd be surprised if the Senate expels him. First, Powell v. McCormack is very clear about whether the Senate could choose to not seat Moore: they can't. If he wins the election and has a valid certificate from the Alabama Secretary of State, he is going to become a United States Senator. What the Senate can do, virtually without limitation, is expel a sitting Senator by a 2/3 vote. Some GOP Senators are already talking about doing this if Moore wins.
If it comes to it, however, I do not think they will expel him. There's a longstanding Senate norm to not punish transgressions that occurred prior to an election if they were fully known by the voters at the time of the most recent election. In effect, the Senate is not willing to overrule an election. In the Moore case, they would not just be overturning an election, but explicitly doing so immediately after the election. There are downsides to this sort of norm, but it does create a certain forward-looking stability; partisans have less incentive to continually rehash bad behavior by their opponents. It also provides an obvious finality to a lot of scandals; once the voters speak, you drop it. In an institution that gives individuals enormous power to impede the legislative process, this can be very helpful as a general principle.
You could see some of this impulse in the Senator Franken revelations this week. Majority leader McConnell immediately pushed for an Ethics Committee investigation, rather than calling for Franken to resign or for the Senate to expel him. To standardize expulsion (or the threat of expulsion) for these sorts of things is to invite a scorched earth battle against all Senators. While many thought McConnell was quickly moving to punish Franken, my sense was that he was looking to buy Franken time in order to prevent a snap resignation that would set a dangerous precedent for the Senate. I think Franken may yet resign, but by offering a process for handling things, McConnell was able to stem any talk about snap expulsion.
This, of course, will not satisfy observers who are horrified by the Moore or Franken scandals and believe the Senate should take any measure necessary to remove them from the chamber, including expulsion. But as a positive description of the long-term institutional incentives, I think it is the likely outcome. If Moore wins, I think he will be a Senator for six years.
As an aside, I think the polls in this race are really hard to trust. It's just so hard to model this electorate:
5. I wrote a short piece for Ripon on congressional reform. You can find it here.
See you next time (probably in two weeks). Thanks for reading!