Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) blasted Senate Republicans for using a controversial accounting measure while seeking to advance President Trump’s massive domestic policy legislation, saying it relies on “fake” math.
“The only way for Republicans to pass this horribly destructive bill, which is based on budget math as fake as Donald Trump’s tan, was to go nuclear and hide it behind a bunch of procedural jargon,” Wyden, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said in a statement late Sunday.
“We’re now operating in a world where the filibuster applies to Democrats but not to Republicans, and that’s simply unsustainable given the triage that’ll be required whenever the Trump era finally ends,” he added.
Democrats have lashed out at Republicans for pressing forward with plans to advance their mammoth “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” using an accounting maneuver known as “current policy,” which scores the extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts as not adding to the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office considers the extension of the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, as adding to the deficit when using an alternative “current law” baseline.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) argued Democrats have previously used current-policy baselines to score legislation, though Democrats argue it was done on a bipartisan basis and not for a bill extending trillions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks.
Wyden and other Democrats accused the GOP majority of nuking chamber rules to solidify the temporary tax cuts from Trump’s first term.
The Senate is set to vote on key pieces of Trump’s signature second-term bill throughout the day Monday during a vote series known as a vote-a-rama.
Senate Republicans teed up the marathon voting session for Monday to meet the White House’s end-of-week deadline to pass the legislation after Vice President Vance and other key members of the Trump administration pressured senators to allow the amendment debate to begin.
GOP leaders are operating with slim margins. An agreement reached late Saturday evening paved the way for crucial votes from Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) to begin debate on the nearly 1,000-page bill.
