House Republicans will vote a second time to pass their tax plan today, completing a blitzkrieg rewrite of the tax code faster than even many in their ranks thought possible just months ago.
The last-minute gambit by Senate Democrats that forced the revote amounts to less than a speed bump in the scheme of things (the minority challenged three pieces of the bill under the Byrd Rule, which governs whether legislation can be considered under special budget rules, including the measure's official title.)
But the Democratic objections points to a potentially serious problem facing Republicans down the road.
Considering the complexity of the code and the breakneck speed with which Republicans rewired it, loopholes, drafting mistakes and unintended consequences in need of fixing are bound to pop up in the months ahead.
As Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg News points out, the months following enactment of the 1986 tax bill revealed “hundreds of mostly minor drafting errors … with more being found each week.” But the GOP will need the help of at least nine Senate Democrats to address them, since Republicans there won’t have the benefit of the fast-track rules they used to pass the tax package with a bare majority. And as Democrats revealed Tuesday, they’re in no mood to help Republicans out of any messes they made.
“Given how intransigent they were on [a technical corrections package] for the Affordable Care Act, I’m skeptical Dems would bail them out of their mistakes,” a Democratic leadership aide said in an email.
That is, Democrats only recently found themselves on the other side of this problem.
Republicans refused to work with them on a package of technical corrections to Obamacare — a once-routine bit of legislative business after the passage of a major bill. Instead, a dispute borne of some sloppy drafting and the subsequent confusion over a four-word phrase in the law touched off a fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It involved who could qualify for federal subsidies to help people afford insurance under the law, and as The Washington Post's Paul Kane wrote in March 2015, a ruling against the administration could have undermined the financial viability of the entire program (the Court found 6 to 3 in favor of the law’s defenders).
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