WASHINGTON — The Republican-led Senate voted 52-48 on Thursday to begin debate on a budget blueprint for a multitrillion-dollar package to pass President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The measure calls for a steep tax cut and a spending increase for immigration enforcement and a Pentagon expansion, alongside unspecified spending cuts and a $5 trillion debt limit increase. It is likely to substantially increase the budget deficit.
Every Republican voted for the measure, except Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats unanimously voted against it.
“The Senate Budget plan gives us the tools that we need to get our shared priorities done, including certain PERMANENT Tax Cuts, Spending Cuts Energy, Historic Investments in Defense, Border, and much more,” Trump wrote on social media on Wednesday.
The Thursday vote has triggered up to 50 hours of debate, followed by an unlimited amendment process before a vote on adopting the budget blueprint that’s expected this weekend. Democrats intend to offer amendments to put Republicans in a political bind, such as barring tax cuts for wealthy earners and forbidding Medicaid cuts.
“You’re going to see a whole lot of amendments going after Donald Trump and the Republicans on a whole bunch of issues where they are favoring billionaires and against families,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. told reporters.
Republicans, who control 53 votes in the Senate, are likely to reject the Democratic amendments and approve the budget resolution in the end. If the House adopts the same measure, that would instruct committees to begin work on the bill that can bypass the Senate's 60-vote threshold and cut Democrats out of the process.
Republicans indicate in the budget blueprint that they plan to use an accounting method to score the cost of permanently extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts at $0, after it was estimated to cost $4.6 trillion in a letter Thursday by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.
The plan allows for an additional $1.5 trillion in tax cuts on top of that, giving the Senate Finance Committee flexibility to decide where those cuts are made. GOP senators told NBC News they may use that to pursue Trump’s other proposals, like nixing taxes on tips.
“It’d be things that the president talked about — like tax on tips, stuff like that. Maybe some other things that we think of,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. “Making the tax cuts permanent will help the economy. Determining the baseline is my job, not anybody else’s.”
The budget plan also paves the way for $175 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement to carry out mass deportation, and a $150 billion increase to military spending.
The big open question is how much spending Republicans will cut, and what they’ll go after. The measure calls for only a few billion dollars in spending cuts, a paltry sum compared to the tax cuts and spending increases it necessitates.
“I think when it comes to cutting spending, we’re not going to go after Medicaid benefits — I agree with that — but there are a lot of things we can do,” Graham told reporters on Thursday, endorsing “a work requirement for able-bodied people” on Medicaid.
“We’re going to cut, I think, trillions of dollars in spending,” he said, without getting specific about how.
The budget resolution also calls for a $5 trillion debt limit increase ahead of a deadline this year to act or risk a default on U.S. debt.
The vote was delayed slightly on Thursday as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., met privately with some senators who had “questions” about the “process” of what comes next, according to Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.
“I know that there’s some senators that have more questions. But we’ve been doing this since January, and the side of the gallows concentrates the mind,” Kennedy said, adding that he advised Thune to call the vote. “The only way to to to get some senators to focus is to hold a vote, and then they’ve got three choices: They can vote yes, they can vote no, or they can jump the rail and run.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said leadership was “not twisting arms, but they — some folks wanted to make sure that they understood how the process worked” and, as a result, proceeding to the vote “took a little bit longer to get it done.”
Democrats, who don’t have the votes to stop it unless four or more Republicans defect, are hoping to at least make it a politically painful vote for the majority party.
“The job of the Democrats over the next 36 hours is to hold the Republicans’ feet to the fire, force them to tell the truth about what they want to do to the American economy and what they believe fairness is, and that is a country that works for a handful of billionaires and lets everybody else eat dirt,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters. “The Democrats are in this fight all the way. We’re ready to go.”
