Senate Republicans are gearing up to debate President Donald Trump's tax cut package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and already there are plans to make significant changes to what the House passed that could pose big roadblocks.
But there's another key complication, Jonathan Gould wrote for Slate — a Senate budget rule that Democrats can use to strip a number of sections out.
That provision is known as the Byrd Rule, which requires budget bills be stripped of items if their impacts on the budget are “merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision.” This is critical because complying with this rule is necessary for Republicans to be able to pass the bill without being subject to a Democratic filibuster.
In other words, if any provisions of the bill aren't primarily about managing the budget, and are instead about other policy issues, they can be struck.
"This balancing sometimes dooms legislative changes, even when they have large budgetary effects," noted Gould. "Democrats learned this the hard way when trying — unsuccessfully — to use reconciliation to give 'Dreamers' permanent legal status and raise the minimum wage under President Joe Biden. The reasoning was that while both policy changes would affect the federal fisc to the tune of many billions of dollars a year, the changes were fundamentally about policy, not budgeting. The same logic could doom some Republican proposals this year."
More relevantly, Democrats used the Byrd Rule to throw out several key parts of Trump's original 2017 tax bill, like a provision that would have repealed rules against churches engaging in political activity.
There are a number of other provisions in Trump's new tax bill that could similarly be vulnerable, including a provision that sells off federal lands, a provision that bans states from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years, and a provision intended to block federal courts from enforcing civil contempt fines against Trump administration officials who defy court orders. Many other provisions, like the rollback of green energy tax credits, are likely to be held valid under the Byrd Rule — but nonetheless, the bill could come out of this process with a lot of its policy items stripped out.
One other consideration is that the decisions on the Byrd Rule lie with the Senate parliamentarian, but Senate Republicans could vote by a simple majority to disregard the findings of the parliamentarian — something that has occasionally happened in the past.
"Yet there is reason to think Republicans will allow the parliamentarian’s judgments to stand, even if they lead some provisions to be dropped from the bill," wrote Gould. "Making it easier to pass legislation would serve Republicans today, but it would likely aid Democrats in the future. For this reason, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell long believed in maintaining the filibuster and railed against expanded use of reconciliation. John Thune, his successor, has indicated that he intends to take a similar approach."
