All Week, Merkley Has Sounded the Alarm on Republicans’ Attempt to Invoke a Budget Gimmick

Republicans Falsely Assume the Budget Committee Chair Can Establish the Baseline, Attempting to Use Section 312 to Allow the Budget Chair to Hide Massive Amounts of Debt

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, has gone to the Senate floor several times to urge his Republican colleagues to preserve honest budgeting and to reject the abuse of section 312 authority in the Budget Act. Republicans are attempting to interpret this section as allowing the Budget Chair to unilaterally rewrite the baseline using “magic math” to pretend their tax cuts for billionaires will cost very little. In reality, this bill will add trillions upon trillions of dollars to the national debt over 30 years. The law states Congress must use honest numbers under a current law baseline to factor in the cost of this bill.

A link to one of Merkley’s speeches can be found below.

###