Here comes the next phony GOP attack on the Biden agenda

Here comes the next phony GOP attack on the Biden agenda

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at the Capitol on Nov. 16. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

 By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman 

Today at 4:48 p.m. EST

In their effort to derail President Biden’s agenda, Republicans have thrown an extraordinary array of lurid and absurd attacks at the provisions that comprise the Build Back Better proposal. One of their biggest arguments of all is that BBB will spend us into oblivion.

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Now, Republicans are set to try yet another tack to bolster this case. They have commissioned a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that is designed to create the impression that the plan spends far more — and has a much bigger impact on the deficit — than it actually does.

And they’re using some pretty rank chicanery to do so. On Friday, the CBO estimate requested by Republicans will be released, according to Democratic sources and a CBO spokesperson, who confirmed it to us.

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Here’s how it works: Republicans have asked the CBO to estimate how much the provisions in the version of BBB that passed the House will cost if they are continued for years beyond the date that the legislation actually stipulates that they’ll end.

The Republican driving this effort — Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina — has been very explicit about this. He recently announced that the CBO had agreed to his request to estimate the cost of the bill if its provisions are made permanent.

Graham called this the bill’s “true cost.” The game is obviously to use this to attack the proposal as the Senate debates its version.

Of course, this won’t be the bill’s “true cost,” if we go by what the House bill actually says. As it passed the House, the bill contains many “sunset” provisions, in which policy changes are in place only temporarily.

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For instance, the expanded child tax credit increase is extended for one year, the universal pre-K provisions and enhanced child care support last six years, the expansion of health care to people in GOP states that refused the Medicaid expansion lasts four years, and so on.

The CBO already did an official score of this version of the bill, and found that it would increase the deficit by a relatively small amount. And if the bill’s increase in IRS enforcement of tax cheats is successful, it could reduce the deficit.

This is not to be confused with the estimate that Republicans have requested, which simply assumes the provisions will be made permanent, to inflate its impact on the deficit. But no one knows whether that’s the case. It’s up to future Congresses. And Biden has said any future extensions must be paid for.

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The White House is preparing to push back on this attack. Administration spokesman Andrew Bates argues that it’s absurd for Republicans to use such trickery to inflate the fiscal impact of BBB, which will deliver enormous benefits to millions of poor and working- and middle-class Americans, given that Republicans blew a huge hole in the deficit with their corporate tax cut.

“There’s a particular irony to Republicans who supported an unpopular tax giveaway to the rich that grew our nation’s debt by $2 trillion resorting to this kind of desperate straw man tactic against a popular economic growth bill for the middle class that will reduce the biggest costs Americans face,” Bates told us.

Republicans have expressed great confidence that attacking BBB will be a political jackpot. But Bates argued this tactic shows the opposite.

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“They have to lie about the president’s position and pretend BBB also includes a second, nonexistent bill that he would not support,” Bates told us. “I honestly can’t think of a more laughably discrediting way to lose the argument than this charade.”

It’s a time-honored bipartisan tradition to shift around deadlines on when programs sunset to make the overall costs of bills more politically palatable. It has been especially common on bills passed through reconciliation, which requires that they cannot increase the deficit beyond 10 years.

But it’s Republicans who have been particularly enthusiastic in their use of this sunset technique, because they seldom try to pay for policy changes they make, and because their most important priority is cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which will necessarily boost the deficit. If those tax cuts are to pass through reconciliation, they have to sunset.

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President George W. Bush signed two major tax cuts whose changes were set to expire after a decade. The GOP tax cut of 2017 made many changes to individual taxes that will sunset in 2026.

Of course, you can argue that the BBB policies might be extended, if and when political pressure mounts to maintain them. You can also argue that Congress might extend these programs without also finding new pay-fors.

But you can’t argue that this hypothetical represents the “true cost” of the bill.

“You can’t assume programs will be extended just because Lindsey Graham wants to assume that,” congressional scholar Norman Ornstein told us. “An estimate based on what’s not in the bill is bogus and fundamentally dishonest.”

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Finally, if you don’t like these budgetary somersaults, blame the filibuster. It’s why we have reconciliation at all, a process that exists to circumvent it. Without the filibuster, there would be no reconciliation and, therefore, no need for all this budgetary legerdemain.

As long as the process exists, both parties will include sunsets in their reconciliation bills, taking a chance on what might happen years in the future. Don’t let Republicans snooker you into thinking there’s anything unusual about what Democrats are doing now.