Durbin picks wrong tax bill reviewer

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., offered several arguments against Republican efforts to pass a tax bill during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

One criticism was procedural, echoing earlier Democratic complaints that Republican bills to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act had been crafted behind closed doors and without normal steps such as committee hearings.

Does Durbin have a point that the Congressional Budget Office has been unusually absent in this process? Not by the way ordinary viewers would hear it.

The CBO is Congress’ nonpartisan number-crunching office, best known for its detailed analyses of pending legislation.

However, there’s one exception to CBO’s role in vetting proposed legislation: tax bills. That duty falls instead to a similar, nonpartisan congressional office known as the Joint Committee on Taxation.

By the time Durbin had made this comment, the joint committee had already published analyses of the House version of the tax bill. On Nov. 9, the committee published an analysis of the bill’s revenue impact. Two days later, the committee published two other analyses, including one on how the bill would affect various segments of the income spectrum.

As it happens, CBO has also

also now mandated that all recruits become trained both as firefighters and as certified paramedics. That lengthens the training process from 12 months to 16.

Fire officials say all of that means there’s got to be some sort of measure to keep things going until the last of 116 current recruits are ready to hit the road. Overtime it is, to the tune of millions each year: nearly $3.5 million in 2014; about $4.7 million in 2015; almost $5.3 million in 2016; and about $4.6 million so far in 2017.

“During this period, the county is covering shifts with the planned, budgeted use of overtime until the recruits complete their training and are assigned to a station,” fire department spokesman Capt. Tommy Rutledge said in an emailed statement.

That won’t happen until mid-2019, Rutledge said, meaning current firefighters have another year-plus of overtime shifts to work.

That doesn’t sit well with Flanigan, who is also upset the county’s fire department personnel weren’t included in the raises recently granted to other public safety agencies in Gwinnett.

Firefighters and paramedics will get the 3 percent raise granted last month to all county employees, but won’t receive the additional 4 percent bump promised to members of the police department, sheriff ’s office, corrections department and emergency 911 center. “Why would you exclude firefighters from a public safety raise knowing that they’re already being forced to work overtime due to staffing in the stations?” Flanigan said. Gwinnett Commission Chairman Charlotte Nash has used the attrition issues of the police department and sheriff’s office in particular to justify their raises. The fire department, which has an authorized strength of 916 employees, currently has just seven vacant positions, Rutledge said. Nash will present her proposed 2018 county budget later this month.

The Republican tax bill is “not being scored by the Congressional Budget Office, as it is traditionally.” — Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., on Sunday in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union”