The Big Beautiful Bill and its Big Ugly Problems

Media Hit, 6/30/25

I was on NTD News (EDIT: link here) talking about the Big Beautiful Bill. In case you haven’t heard, the Senate is in the midst of their “vote-a-rama” for their own version of the bill after receiving the House’s version. But what you’ve probably been paying the most attention to is the Senate Parliamentarian “striking down” several provisions in the Senate version of the BBB. But how can this unelected person do this, what does it actually mean, and does the Senate actually have to listen to her?

Senate Parliamentarian

• The Senate Parliamentarian is the person who, essentially, enforces the Rules of the Senate.

• In doing so, she also serves as the “keeper” of the precedents of the Senate and provides some semblance of continuity, at least in principle, across Senate leaderships and Congressional sessions.

• As I’m sure you can imagine, many of the bills that the Senate considers are multifaceted and complicated. But they are not unprecedented.

  • A tax bill affecting, say, agriculture might be introduced. Is this a tax bill or is it an agriculture bill? To which committee should it be assigned first?

  • These questions have been answered in the past and it would be wise to follow the same process unless there is a compelling, non-partisan reason to deviate from this precedent.

  • If we do not, then the President of the Senate and/or the Senate Majority Leader could conceivably wield even more power than they already do by being able to send bills around in whatever order they want.

• In a sense, the parliamentarian serves as an important check against a tyranny of the majority.

• Importantly, they do this regardless of who is in the majority/minority.

  • The parliamentarian might stifle your desires when you’re in control, but they are an essential ally when you are in the minority.

Budget Reconciliation

• Budget reconciliation, the process by which Congress hopes to pass the BBB, is a unique legislative situation.

• Under normal rules, the Senate must invoke cloture before voting on a bill, which takes 60 votes. After cloture is invoked, a bill can be passed by simple majority.

  • However, because cloture must be invoked, Senators can simply vote against cloture and, effectively, prevent a bill from being passed.

  • Imagine a situation where, say, 55 Senators support a proposed bill but 45 do not. The 45 know that if cloture is invoked, the bill will pass. So what do they do? Simply not support cloture by, among other things, using a filibuster.

  • In doing so, cloture is never invoked and the bill cannot be voted on, so it fails.

• Budget reconciliation packages, however, do not require cloture and so they can be passed by simple majority straight away.

• Their purpose is to, essentially, make adjustments to the budget in the middle of the fiscal year in light of new information/developments.

  • Anyone involved in corporate budgeting is likely familiar with the idea of a “preliminary budget.” Those are great and are obviously helpful, but often we find that in the middle of the fiscal year, reality is not going according to the budget plans that we made going into the fiscal year.

  • Reconciliation is a means by which we can go from a “preliminary budget” to an “amended budget” in light of this new information.

  • It is NOT meant to allow for genuinely new provisions, it is only meant to provide an opportunity to revise the current budget in light of new information/developments.

• Because of this, there are strict rules for what can and cannot be done through budget reconciliation, commonly known as the “Byrd Rule.”

Byrd Rule

• The Byrd Rule was adopted in 1985 and 1986 and eventually made permanent as Section 313 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

• The basic idea is that, because reconciliation is a budgetary matter, only provisions that affect either revenues or expenditures can be included in reconciliation packages.

• There is some leeway for interpretation here, since virtually everything that Congress votes on will affect either revenues or expenditures.

  • For example, if Congress were to try to pass a bill that says, “we’re going to go to war with country X” in the reconciliation package, there will absolutely be spending associated with that decision.

  • However, this would be struck down as “extraneous” or “not-germane” since the spending is “incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision.”

So What Happened?

I got called a Keynesian! (EDIT: it’s at the 11:40 mark) Tim Doescher of Unleash Prosperity accused me of such after I repeatedly pointed out that the BBB would 1) impoverish poor people and enrich the already wealthy, 2) add substantially to the deficit, and 3) that extending already-existing tax cuts was not an additional tax cut.

I don’t really understand how any of those are “Keynesian.” I even went out of my way to highlight some of the good things in the BBB and pointed out that, on net, I thought the bill was fine. My point was really, really simple: for a budget reconciliation bill, which, you know, is supposed to reconcile the budget, this thing pretty much fails. Some of its provisions might be “decent,” “OK,” or dare I say “good.” But it by and large fails to actually reconcile the budget in any way, shape, or form.

I mean, imagine for a minute that you wanted to reconcile your own budget after overspending for the first six or so months of the year. You come back not with a new budget for the latter half of the year, but instead with a budget that actually overspends even more. Any objective outside observer would say that you failed to reconcile your budget. But with this, we’re supposed to suspend belief? Give me a break.