U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen stood before the House of Representatives this week to warn about a fiscally dangerous arrangement in the proposed Republican rules for considering legislation. The rules, contained in H. Res. 5, contained provisions to prevent responsible tax reform in order to deal with the deficit. Van Hollen explained,

“The American people did not bargain for a plan in the first 24 hours of the new Congress that would blow a hole in the deficit and expand the debt. The chairman of the Rules Committee mentioned the recent bipartisan tax agreement. We also recently had a bipartisan commission on the deficit and debt reduction. It looked at both sides of the equation–spending and the fact that we have created lots of tax loopholes that have lost revenue to special interests. What this plan does, what the rule does, is say that that doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t count against the deficit.”

H. Res. 5 was passed before the American people even had a chance to read it. In addition to preventing deficit reforms to eliminate wasteful tax entitlements for politically connected groups, the legislation eliminates the role of the Congressional Budget Office in calculating the impact of legislation on the deficit. Just one month ago, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that Republican plans to give tax breaks to wealth Americans will expand the deficit by huge amounts. Apparently, the House Republicans have been embarrassed by such revelations, and so have moved to silence the CBO. Van Hollen warned:

“The current practice of this Congress has been that we will use the budget estimates of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to determine the deficit impact on the laws that we pass here in this body for the purpose of pay-as-you-go. That is because, while we should have a vigorous debate over policy, we don’t want politicians inventing self-serving budget numbers.

Now, the Congressional Budget Office serves as our umpire. They call the balls and the strikes, as you know. Sometimes we don’t like the calls they make. Sometimes we do. Yet what this rule says is we are going to take the umpire off the field when it comes to statutory PAYGO. We are going to substitute our accounting for the folks whose professional job it is to determine the deficit impact of different legislation that we pass. I think when the American people find out that this opens the door to this kind of fun and games, they are going to ask themselves: Is this something I really bargained for?”