H.R. 1

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, on July 1, 2025, the Senate passed H.R. 1, which is nothing more than one big, beautiful, betrayal for Americans across the country. This bill slashes healthcare for 17 million Americans by gutting Medicaid and dismantling the Affordable Care Act. It shuts down rural hospitals, it takes food away from more than 4 million hungry children, it makes college more expensive for families, and it ends clean energy investments to fight climate chaos. All to make tax cuts permanent and help billionaires get richer.

And if that isn't bad enough, it destroys the architecture of fiscal discipline put in place 51 years ago and explodes the debt by $3.3 trillion over 10 years and by more than $30 trillion over 30 years-- again, all in pursuit of making billionaires richer.

And if those eye-popping debt numbers aren't alarming enough, CBO projects that if interest rates go up by as little as 1 percent, the costs could double. This is the most fiscally irresponsible bill ever to come to the Senate floor and wasn't supposed to be possible after Congress passed the 1974 Budget Control and Impoundment Act.

In 1974, addressing the deficit was such a bipartisan priority that the Budget Act created a special filibuster-free fast-track process, known as reconciliation, for the sole purpose of reducing the deficit. That is right, the original purpose of reconciliation was to reduce the deficit.

The reconciliation process was built on three pillars. First, a reconciliation bill cannot create deficits in the first 10 years. Second, a reconciliation bill can't increase the deficit in any year after the first 10 years. And third, it should be measured using honest numbers from the independent, nonpartisan, scorekeepers.

So how did we go from every Senator voting for a special process for deficit reduction in 1974, to almost every Republican, the party who claims to support fiscal responsibility, supporting a 2025 reconciliation bill that adds tens of trillions to the debt?

It started in 1996, when the Republicans wanted to pass tax giveaways for the wealthy and didn't have the required 60 votes so they turned to the reconciliation process. Except they had one problem, reconciliation wasn't supposed to increase the deficit in the first 10 years. Instead of finding a compromise, the Republicans decided to change the rules and allow a reconciliation bill to increase the deficit in the first 10 years. That was the end of pillar one, and the reconciliation process has been abused in the same way ever since--for the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the 2003 Bust tax cuts, and the 2017 Trump cuts.

But pillar two and pillar three were still standing. That is, until now. In the Republican's never-ending quest to make billionaires richer, they once again changed the rules. This time in order to hide the true cost of this bill. In doing so, pillar two and pillar three collapsed and all remaining remnants of fiscal discipline with it.

During consideration of H.R. 1, Senate Republicans upended decades of law and precedent and allowed the Budget Committee chair to abuse the authority under section 312 of the Budget Act to determine violations of section 313 of the Budget Act, also known as the Byrd Rule.

I recognize that section 312 of the Budget Act gives the Budget chair scorekeeping duties. Read in isolation, or with no understanding of past precedent, section 312 could appear to be unlimited. But it is not. The authority in section 312 must be read in combination with other provisions of the Budget Act, with other budget laws, and with Senate precedent, particularly in relationship to the Byrd Rule as it always has been.

I do not dispute that when bills are considered under regular order, it is the Budget Committee chair's responsibility to determine what numeric budget points of order lie. However, the Budget Committee chair has never determined whether provisions of a reconciliation bill comply with the Byrd Rule, that has always been the responsibility of the Parliamentarian's office.

And why is the Byrd Rule so unique from other budget enforcement tools? It is unique where it applies--just in the Senate, and not the House; it is unique when it applies--only for reconciliation, a fast track process, not regular order; it is unique how it applies and is adjudicated--a formal litigation where the Parliamentarian's office issues guidance based on written and oral arguments and nonpartisan current law scoring estimates.

It is not normal budget enforcement. Why is that? Because reconciliation is a fast track process, and Senators, with eyes wide open, voted to impose these strict guardrails on this process.

The majority's assertion of 312 authority also runs counter to section 257 of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, which defines the current law baseline. The section 257 baseline, as it is called, has been the foundation for the nonpartisan cost estimates for the past 40 years, estimates produced by the independent scorekeepers: the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The Senate has never, before consideration of H.R. 1, used cost estimates based on something other than the section 257 baseline to assess reconciliation legislation for compliance with the Byrd Rule.

To reiterate: in developing their guidance under the Byrd Rule, the Parliamentarian's office has never--never--used cost estimates other than those based on the section 257 baseline. With the majority's actions on H.R.1, Republicans have dealt the remaining pillars of reconciliation a fatal blow.

While section 312 has never been used in reconciliation, I agree that it has been used in regular order. But I want to make clear that use of section 312 authority, up until now, has only been invoked when the issue at hand was narrow, technical, often bipartisan, involved relatively small amounts of money, and was done in regular order.

For example, during the bipartisan ``side deal'' between Leader Schumer and Speaker Johnson for the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process, Democratic Senate Budget Committee Chair Whitehouse and Republican House Budget Committee Chair Arrington included a direction to CBO to use the Office of Management and Budget's estimate of housing receipts, which allowed for an extra $2.8 billion in offsets for that package.

In 2023, when the Agriculture Committee wanted to extend a dairy provision, CBO's initial estimate counted the same spending twice. Again, Democratic Chair Whitehouse and Republican Chair Arrington used the section 312 authority in a bipartisan manner to instruct CBO to conform to the way it originally scored the program.

On a bipartisan basis during the fiscal years 2023-2025 appropriations cycles, Budget chairs have directed CBO to score appropriations language related to the Purchase Power and Wheeling activities of three Federal Power Marketing Administrations consistent with a 2000 bipartisan scorekeeping agreement that CBO had recently deviated from.

By far the most common use of section 312 authority over the past decade relates to directing CBO to follow legislative text commonly included in omnibus legislation to allocate the budgetary effects to the proper committee.

These examples all illustrate how section 312 allows the Budget chair to step in to address scoring issues and resolve ambiguities. In all cases, these efforts have been narrowly applied and concerned discrete polices with limited budgetary impacts.

And again, in none of these examples was the Senate considering a reconciliation bill.

During debate on H.R.1, the majority has also falsely claimed precedent exists for their actions. I will now explain why each instance the Republicans cite is clearly distinguishable from their current abuse of section 312 authority.

Senator Graham, the current chair of the Budget Committee, claimed that former Budget Chair Kent Conrad ``used a new baseline in the budget so he could get the farm bill in the budget.'' This is a mischaracterization. In 2008, during Farm Bill negotiations, Budget Chair Conrad chose not to apply an updated CBO baseline while the bill was in conference committee. Over the course of the prior year, both the House and Senate had passed a Farm Bill and having to change all the numbers during conference negotiations would have undone a year's worth of work. There is also longstanding precedent to not update for new baseline estimates at the last minute when a bill that has been carefully negotiated is nearing completion. Further, Chair Conrad used a current law baseline to measure the farm bill. This was not a scoring manipulation meant to skirt the guardrails of a fast-track process.

Second, the majority has repeatedly referred to the Obama administration's supposed use of a current policy baseline to score a tax bill in 2012 that extended most of the expiring Bush tax cuts. At the time, the Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget produced a ``current policy'' score that they used when publicly talking about the benefits of the bill. It served a purely messaging purpose. Congress did not--I repeat, did not--use a current policy baseline for official budget enforcement purposes in the Senate. Congress used the current law score from CBO. This bill also passed under regular order, not reconciliation.

Another example cited by the majority party is former Budget Chair Bernie Sanders including a scoring rule for childcare and pre- kindergarten legislation in the fiscal year 2022 budget resolution. This scoring rule did not override current law; rather it forced CBO to conform to current law as laid out in section 257. This Head Start scoring rule was isolated to one program that affected $18 billion over 10 years and was never ultimately used.

Before it was further amended on the Senate floor, the Senate reconciliation bill added $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the 10-year budget window. By abusing the authority under section 312, the Republicans claim that H.R. 1 actually saves $500 billion. The Finance Committee title alone adds $3.5 trillion to the deficit over the 10- year budget window. But the Republican's claim, alleging section 312 authority, that the Finance title actually saves $300 billion and thus meets its reconciliation instruction.

The blatant abuse of claiming section 312 authority to determine H.R. 1 complied with section 313 of the Budget Act is unprecedented, overrides current law, and will forever change the Senate. And it was all done to further an agenda of families lose, billionaires win.

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