In the Democratic National Convention hall, in side events in hotel ballrooms and conference centers, and on the campaign trail, lawmakers and candidates are promising big change.
They have promised to codify Roe v. Wade and end the assault on reproductive rights. They have promised to end gerrymandering and voter suppression in a pair of consequential voting-rights bills: the For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. They want to address affordable housing, child care, paid family and medical leave, and child poverty; they want to transform the tax code; and so on.
To accomplish all of this, or at least to make it unencumbered by artificial constraints and rules and processes, they need to end the circumstance whereby a minority of members in the US Senate get a veto over everything the chamber does. At the heart of the entire agenda that this convention’s pitch is predicated upon is the imperative to reform the filibuster.
Republicans will not vote for abortion rights or voting rights; under a sixty-vote Senate, those bills will fail. You could technically get tax reform and care-economy investments done the way it was done in 2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act, by using budget reconciliation. But that carries with it complicated rules about spending limitations within the ten-year budget window.
Because Kamala Harris’s tax plans would raise trillions of dollars by eliminating Trump-era tax cuts for the rich, along with raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, that would seem like no problem. But with the Child Tax Credit expansion costing over $1 trillion within that same ten-year window, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promising to repeal the cap on state and local tax deductions costing hundreds of billions, the no-taxes-on-tips proposal costing hundreds of billions more, and a drive to devote some portion of the proceeds to deficit reduction, those dollars won’t stretch as far as…
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Auteur: David Dayen
