CBO Reveals How Bad the Manchin-Schumer Bill Is While Parliamentarian Stomps on Dems' Dreams
Turns out there was a reason that the Democrats were trying to rush through the Manchin-Schumer deal before the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) fully scored what the impact of the bill was going to be.
The Senate has already approved the bill and the House is expected to vote on it on Friday. About 35 percent of the House will be voting remotely.
The CBO said on Thursday that it needs more time to fully score the current Senate-passed version of the bill but it’s been scheduled for a House vote anyway.
“Given the scope of the amendments to title I, Committee on Finance, CBO expects that it will be a few weeks before we can fully analyze and estimate those budgetary effects, at which point we will provide a complete cost estimate for the legislation,” CBO Director Phillip Swagel wrote on Thursday in a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
But the CBO is busting the lie about not raising taxes one penny on people making less than $400,000. The GOP proposed an amendment regarding people making less than $400,000 that said they would be protected from the impact of the bill.
The CBO said that they had “not completed a point estimate of this amendment but the preliminary assessment indicates that amendment 5404 would reduce the ‘non-scorable’ revenues resulting from the provisions of section 10301 by at least $20 billion over the FY2022-FY2031 period.”
In other words, the CBO is saying the Biden/Manchin/Schumer monstrosity bill anticipates grabbing $20 billion from lower and middle-class people. So much for the claim that this is just going after the billionaires. It’s never just “billionaires,” just like it’s never lupus on the television show, “House.” It’s always a lie that it’s going to be limited. So this is the official confirmation the Biden team is lying. The Democrats refused to pass the amendment to protect lower and middle-class Americans.
Now 360 economists are saying it will do what they claim.
Despite Manchin claiming that he cared about preserving the energy industry, he had a horrible provision as part of the bill.
But the stealth killer was its grant of authority that would have unleashed regulators on the fossil-fuel industry, especially coal. The Clean Air Act doesn’t say agencies can regulate greenhouse-gas emissions as pollutants, and the issue has been fought over in court. Mr. Manchin’s deal included a provision that explicitly authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to do so under numerous provisions of the law.
This could have nullified coal producers’ ability to challenge regulation under the recent Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA that said Congress must clearly authorize agency actions that have major economic significance. In a rejoinder to the coal producers, Mr. Manchin claimed the bill did “not provide any new authority for EPA to shut down coal plants.”
This provision could have allowed all sorts of regulations that would have harmed the energy industry and flown in the face of the Supreme Court decision.
His fellow Senator, Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV), proposed an amendment to get rid of it, and Democrats including Manchin shot it down. But then Capito appealed to the Parliamentarian that this didn’t comply with budget reconciliation rules which prohibit measures whose budgetary effects are “merely incidental” to the policy impact. The Senate Parliamentarian agreed and struck the provision. But Manchin and all the Democrats would have given the EPA all that unbridled authority over the industry. So either he isn’t a moderate or he just got played big time by Schumer on that one.
Not only did Manchin get played in all this but, as we reported, he has also had a net decline in favorability of 29 percent since he came up with this deal. Not only is that fully justified, but it also shows how unpopular this bill truly is when he drops that precipitously.
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