This year has, unfortunately, provided some excellent illustrations of Congress’s dysfunction.
We are currently emerging from a record-long shutdown. Senate Democrats filibustered funding in a doomed effort to extend a temporary boost, originally enacted in 2021, to Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Earlier this year, though, Republicans used a special budget process called “reconciliation” to pass a partisan tax bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. They used this process, which is immune to the filibuster, to make the budget picture worse: The Congressional Budget Office found the bill will increase the deficit more than $3 trillion over ten years. To top it off, Republicans blew a massive hole in a rule limiting reconciliation bills’ deficit increases to that ten-year window.
In a country as divided and antagonistic as today’s America, lawmaking is bound to get messy. But in a new issue brief for the Manhattan Institute, I have offered some suggestions for making things a little better, specifically when it comes to reconciliation bills like the one Congress passed earlier this year.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Hill
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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