The CRS Report on Reconciliation Shows How Congress Gave Up on Honest Lawmaking

The Congressional Research Service has produced another careful, neutral explainer of the budget reconciliation process, and most people will scroll right past it because it sounds like procedural inside baseball. That is exactly why it matters. Read with a constitutional eye, the report is not a user's manual for efficient lawmaking. It is a quiet confession that Congress has traded permanent, honest budgeting for temporary law, accounting tricks, and raw majority power.

The Machinery in Plain English

Under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the House and Senate can adopt a budget resolution instructing committees to produce bills that change mandatory spending, revenue, or the debt limit. Those bills get special treatment. They cannot be filibustered in the Senate, and a simple majority can pass them. A separate rule, the Byrd Rule, is supposed to limit abuse by barring extraneous matter, including provisions that would increase deficits outside the budget window.

That last piece is what most coverage skips, but it contains the whole lesson. The budget window is arbitrary, usually ten years. To satisfy the Byrd Rule and score a bill as deficit neutral, lawmakers write major policies to expire before the window closes. The tax cut becomes a tax cut for nine years. The spending program becomes a spending program for five. The result is not permanent law. It is a cliff that Congress builds and then pretends to be shocked about when it arrives.

Temporary Law Is No Law at All

Henry Hazlitt taught us to look at the seen and the unseen. The seen is the tax relief or the new benefit. The unseen is the small business that delays hiring because it does not know whether expensing provisions will survive the next Congress. The unseen is the family that cannot plan around a child tax credit set to vanish. The unseen is the capital parked on the sidelines by an unstable tax code. Congress calls this budget discipline, but it is the opposite. It is legislating uncertainty.

Think about what that does to the economy Milton Friedman described in Capitalism and Freedom. Free markets depend on stable rules of the game. When the tax code expires every few years, the price system cannot do its work properly. Entrepreneurs cannot calculate whether a long-term investment makes sense if depreciation schedules, research and development expensing, or pass-through deductions are scheduled to sunset. The dispersed knowledge that Friedrich Hayek said lives in millions of individual decisions gets scrambled by a legislature that refuses to make durable choices. Every business decision becomes a guess about what a future Congress will do rather than a judgment about what the market demands.

Thomas Sowell's constrained vision applies directly. The assumption that today's politicians can fix tomorrow's consequences with tomorrow's votes is precisely how bad policy compounds. Sunsets are not fiscal virtue. They are a confession that a policy cannot stand on its own merits beyond an accounting period. A tax cut that expires in ten years is not a permanent tax cut. It is a political announcement that the law is not stable enough to trust. The same goes for spending. If a program cannot be justified as permanent law, it should not be funded through a gimmick that assumes it will disappear.

The Constitution Did Not Ask for This

Then there is the constitutional damage. The Founders built a Senate to cool the House's passions. In Federalist 62, Madison warned that large assemblies are susceptible to sudden impulses and that a chosen body should impose stability on the government. The Senate exists to check exactly that. Reconciliation is a creature of the 1974 Budget Act, not the Constitution. It lets a bare majority in both chambers bypass the Senate's traditional sixty-vote deliberation. We are a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy, precisely because transient majorities should not be able to rewrite the nation's fiscal rules in one afternoon. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. It does not give fifty-one senators the power to make temporary law by permanent gimmick.

None of this makes reconciliation unconstitutional. The Constitution lets each house set its own rules. But the routine use of reconciliation to pass vast fiscal policy is a choice, and it is a choice that drains the Senate of its constitutional character. It turns the world's greatest deliberative body into a smaller, faster House with no memory. The damage is not to this bill or that bill. The damage is to the idea that major laws should be made deliberately, debated openly, and enacted with enough permanence that citizens can plan their lives around them.

The History Is a Warning

The record makes this concrete. The tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were passed through reconciliation with sunset provisions because a handful of Democrats refused to support making them permanent under regular order. The result was a decade of uncertainty, the fiscal cliff of 2012, and endless annual fights over the alternative minimum tax, the estate tax, and expired deductions. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 used reconciliation to pass individual rate cuts that expire at the end of 2025 while making most corporate cuts permanent. That was not a principled fiscal decision. That was an accounting trick to fit the Byrd Rule's ten-year window. The American Rescue Plan of 2021 used reconciliation to expand the child tax credit for one year. When it expired, millions of families watched their monthly checks disappear. The politicians who passed it said it was temporary. The families who relied on it discovered too late that temporary means until the next election.

Both parties have used this tool. Democrats have used reconciliation to expand health programs. Republicans have used it to cut taxes. My objection is not to cutting taxes. I want them lower. The objection is to the pretense. If a tax cut is good policy, it should be enacted honestly under regular order. If it cannot survive open debate and a recorded vote on the merits, that tells you something about the policy, not the process. The same standard applies to spending. If a program is so valuable, pass it permanently and defend it. If not, do not send it into the world with a built-in expiration date and call it compassion.

The deeper problem is that reconciliation has become the default path for any major fiscal legislation because the Senate no longer wants to do its job. The filibuster was never in the Constitution, but the Senate's rules historically forced broad consensus for large changes. Reconciliation lets fifty-one senators impose a temporary version of their vision on the entire country, knowing that the next majority will repeal or replace it. That is not deliberation. That is ping-pong governance, and the American people are the ball.

A Better Way Forward

There is a better way, and it is not complicated. Pass budgets honestly. Debate taxes and spending openly under regular order. If a policy is good, make it permanent and defend it on the merits. If it is bad, kill it. Stop using the budget window as a magic eraser for future deficits. Stop enacting laws that expire as a political stalking horse. The Constitution envisioned a Congress that makes laws, not temporary suggestions. The ordinary citizen deserves decisions made honestly, permanently, and within the constitutional rules, not a permanent campaign to extend expiring laws.

The CRS report will not tell you whether the current reconciliation bill is good or bad. That is not its job. But what it reveals is more important. Congress has built an assembly line for temporary, gimmicked, majority-imposed fiscal law. That is not limited government. That is government by sunset and scoring trick. Liberty depends on law that people can rely on. When Congress cannot even make its own fiscal rules stable, how can it be trusted to guard anything else? The answer is it cannot. And that is why the report, boring as it seems, is a map of Congress's quiet surrender.