Republicans in Congress are colluding with Democrats on the budget

The champagne corks are popping now that Republicans have passed the first significant tax overhaul in 30 years. While it’s certainly not the sweeping reform that the GOP initially wanted, 80 percent of American households will be able to keep more of their own money. That’s a good thing.

What’s less good is the process by which they got there, and what it means for the state of modern fiscal conservatism.

In order to pass tax reform, Republicans are deliberately choosing to undo the fiscal accountability measures that many of them voted to implement less than 10 years ago.

{mosads}In 2010, a Democrat majority voted to institute the statutory pay-as-you-go law, or Paygo. The law requires that tax cuts or other legislation be paid for, or else spending cuts are automatically triggered at the end of the year.

Democrats never intended for Paygo to actually cut spending. Rather, they wanted to use it to block future GOP tax reform. In spite of this, Paygo is one of several statutory controls on spending that the GOP could use to its benefit. 

The tax bill is estimated to add at least $1.5 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, and thus, would trigger $136 billion in mandatory Paygo spending cuts. (Notably, the Paygo law limits the amount of money that can be cut from Medicare, Social Security and other low-income programs.)

However, congressional Republicans appear on track to do two things to get around these fiscal accountability measures.

First, they’ll delay sending it to the president for his signature. If fully passing the bill in 2017 will trigger the automatic cuts, then why not wait until 2018 to sign it? Congress is not required to immediately send bills to the president for his signature, and Trump’s own economic advisor, Gary Cohn, noted that Trump will delay signing the bill in order to avoid Paygo spending cuts.

Second, congressional Republicans will vote to waive the Paygo requirements as part of the continuing resolution they pass at the end of the year, likely with an enactment date of Jan. 1, 2018. This has the twofold effect of eliminating the required spending cuts associated with tax reform, and for any other legislation passed as part of 2018.

The momentum toward tax reform drowned out many of the arguments for keeping Paygo in place. Indeed, there are thoughtful and compelling arguments in favor of the idea that allowing people to keep more of their own money should not require offsets with spending cuts elsewhere.

But the larger message the GOP is sending is that spending restraints don’t matter; that the law passed in 2010 was simply what Democrats said it was — a shiny messaging vehicle, not intended to have any real impact on government spending.

There is no clearer illustration of this than the response Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) provided to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Collins reached out to the GOP leadership earlier this year, concerned tax cuts would trigger a sequester for programs like Medicare. McConnell and Ryan assured their colleague that “this will not happen,” noting that lawmakers have “readily available methods to waive this law, which has never been enforced since its enactment.”

In other words, “Don’t worry, Susan, the existence of Paygo lets us look fiscally responsible, and then we waive it every year so it has no actual impact.”

It’s a casually offered, but remarkably brazen admission that everyone is Congress is in on the joke. The GOP campaigns on reining in spending (an issue that a significant portion of GOP voters still rank as very high among their priorities), point to laws like Paygo and the Budget Control Act as evidence of their commitment, and then head to Washington and vote to waive every single self-imposed restraint.

It’s not only a staggering degree of hypocrisy, but for conservatives, it’s another example of leadership being strategically short-sighted.

The fact of the matter is, even if Paygo itself is never implemented, the act of waiving it provides an opportunity for conservatives to negotiate for concessions elsewhere. The Paygo waiver passed as part of the CR will likely be for all of 2018. This means conservatives have just relinquished their ability to leverage any kind of spending cuts or reforms.

When statutory Paygo passed in 2010, it was lauded as a monument to the fiscal conservatism. That brand has since been watered down to the point of total dilution; a label that now stands for nothing.

It would be nice if, instead of hiding behind the veneer of fiscal competence, congressional Republicans finally just admitted that they’re no better than Democrats.