For decades, senators looking to push major budget and tax legislation through Congress on a simple majority vote have had to win the blessing of a single unelected figure on Capitol Hill.
The Senate parliamentarian, a civil servant who acts as the arbiter and enforcer of the chamber’s byzantine rules, has traditionally been in a position to make or break entire presidential agendas. That includes determining whether budget and tax legislation can be fast-tracked through Congress and shielded from a filibuster, allowing it to pass along party lines through a process known as reconciliation.
Now, in their zeal to deliver President Trump’s domestic policy agenda in “one big beautiful bill” of spending and tax cuts, Senate Republicans are trying to steer around the parliamentarian, busting a substantial congressional norm in the process.
The strategy would allow them to avoid getting a formal thumbs up or thumbs down on their claim that extending the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing — a gimmick that would make it easier for them cram as many tax reductions as possible into their bill without appearing to balloon the deficit.
In recent days, all eyes have been on Elizabeth MacDonough, the parliamentarian, to see whether she would bless the trick, smoothing the path for the G.O.P. bill. But on Wednesday, Republicans signaled that they planned to take extraordinary action to go around her altogether.
Rather than have Ms. MacDonough weigh in, they asserted that Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as chairman of the Budget Committee, could unilaterally decide the cost of the legislation, citing a 1974 budget law. Senate Republicans on Wednesday unveiled a new budget resolution they planned to put to a vote as early as this week. And Mr. Graham declared in a statement that he considered an extension of the 2017 tax cuts to be cost-free.
“It is now time for the Senate to move forward with this budget resolution in order to further advance our shared Republican agenda in Congress,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, said.
The approach amounts to a rewriting of the strictly-governed reconciliation process, and a backdoor way to knock down a crucial Senate guardrail on a simple majority vote — using the so-called nuclear option in a move akin to eliminating the filibuster.
Changes to fiscal policy are typically measured against the costs of what Congress has already passed into law, which is called the “current law base line.” But Republicans want to abandon that standard and instead measure changes against the cost of policies already in place, even those that are temporary.
“I have determined that current policy will be the budget base line regarding taxation,” Mr. Graham said in his statement. “This will allow the tax cuts to be permanent.”
The question of what the legislation costs is a crucial one. Nonpartisan budget scorekeepers have estimated that extending the tax cuts would cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade. Senate Republicans, who also want to cut a long list of other taxes, are arguing that keeping the original Trump tax cuts in place is actually free. That would make it much easier for them to write legislation with a price tag more palatable to fiscal hawks.
The resolution they unveiled on Wednesday would pave the way for extending the 2017 tax cuts, tee up $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts and increase the debt limit by $5 trillion. It creates two different levels of spending cuts for House and Senate committees to meet — just a few billion dollars in the Senate, versus $1.5 trillion in the House.
Beyond the optics of making the cost of the tax cut seem smaller, changing the base line comes with an additional benefit for Senate Republicans: the ability to continue the tax cuts indefinitely. One of the limitations of reconciliation is that it does not allow lawmakers to add to the deficit in the long term.
Under typical budget rules, Republicans would have to find long-term spending cuts that cover the cost of the Trump tax cuts far into the future — or schedule them to expire again within 10 years. With a change in the base line, though, continuing the Trump tax cuts would not appear to add to the deficit, so Republicans believe they could pass a law that would keep them in place forever.
Ordinarily, Ms. MacDonough would have to determine whether Republicans could use that scoring strategy. If she decided that they could not, Republicans would be sent back to the drawing board to confront a series of tough decisions they have so far tried to avoid about what tax cuts they would be able to include, and how to offset their costs.
But Republicans are now arguing they don’t need Ms. MacDonough at all.
“I think really, we don’t need to have her weigh in,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas said.
“We would not be overruling the parliamentarian,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. “We would be supporting the interpretation of the chairman.”
Still, the move is all but certain to lead to a challenge on the floor from Democrats, and to Republicans setting a new precedent that the majority party can steer around the parliamentarian on budget matters whenever it chooses to.
Molly E. Reynolds, an expert on congressional procedure and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that disregarding the views of the parliamentarian would be a major departure from how the Senate has long been governed.
“We should think of this as a version of the nuclear option,” she said, using the term for unilaterally changing Senate practices through parliamentary rulings. “If we were to get to a world where there just sort of ignoring the parliamentarian and not engaging all, that would be really profound change in how the Senate works, and a real erosion of rules-based legislating in the Senate.”
A confrontation over the issue could come as early as this week. In that scenario, Democrats would object to Republicans’ scoring strategy, and the G.O.P. would then move to kill the objection with a simple majority vote.
“I anticipate Senator Schumer will have something to say about it,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican member of the Budget Committee, said, referring to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader. “He’ll object, and we’ll win.”
Democrats have argued that removing the authority to determine such a weighty matter from the parliamentarian and vesting it with a partisan committee chairman would in effect be the same as destroying the filibuster. It would make virtually any legislation the chairman deemed fit eligible for passage with 51 votes, rather than 60.
“Republicans know their so-called current policy gimmick won’t likely fly,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “So now they’re getting ready to decide for themselves which rules of the Senate to follow, and which rules to ignore.”
Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
