{"id":110820,"date":"2025-06-20T17:12:48","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T22:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=110820"},"modified":"2025-06-20T17:12:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T22:12:48","slug":"110820","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=110820","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

End to Taxes, Registration on Most NFA Items Faces a Weekend Byrd Bath<\/a><\/p>\n

Donald Trump has said he wants to see his One Big Beautiful Bill hit the Resolute desk in the Oval Office by July 4th, and though it remains to be seen whether Republicans in the House and Senate will be able to meet that deadline, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has set an aggressive schedule in the upper chamber, with a goal of having the full Senate cast its first procedural vote on the bill by the middle of next week.<\/p>\n

For gun owners, the biggest question is whether the language removing the tax and registration requirement on suppressors, short-barreled firearms, and “any other weapons” will survive the Senate parliamentarian’s scrutiny of the bill. Politico reports the Byrd bath, as it’s colloquially known, will begin in earnest\u00a0this weekend<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Senate rule-keeper Elizabeth MacDonough is scrubbing the final draft of the megabill in a \u201cbig beautiful\u201d Byrd bath. Her rulings on which provisions will fly under the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process are expected to roll in through the middle of next week, when Thune wants to schedule the first procedural vote related to the package.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Republicans are bracing for an answer to one consequential question they punted on earlier this year: whether they can use an accounting maneuver known as \u201ccurrent policy baseline\u201d to make it appear that extending Trump\u2019s 2017 tax cuts would cost nothing.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Senate Finance Republicans and Democrats will make a joint presentation to MacDonough this weekend about which provisions to keep or scrap. And there\u2019s no shortage of GOP priorities under Byrd scrutiny \u2014 from tax cuts on certain gun silencers to a plan to raise taxes on foreign companies known as the \u201crevenge tax.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Other outstanding issues before the parliamentarian: whether Commerce has to tweak language to prohibit states from regulating AI over the next decade; whether Judiciary can block judges\u2019 ability to issue preliminary injunctions; and whether Agriculture can use the megabill to pay for pieces of the stalled farm bill.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Punchbowl News reports that Democrats are planning on challenging about 60 provisions in the text offered by the Senate Finance Committee, and the language that would remove the taxation and registration requirements for most NFA items is among their their targets. Supporters of the language have expressed confidence that the measures will survive the Byrd Bath, with Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia\u00a0telling Fox News<\/a>\u00a0that the “taxation and registration of firearms under the draconian NFA are inseparably linked,” and therefore should easily fit within the reconciliation guidelines.<\/p>\n

Over at The Reload, Stephen Gutowski isn’t\u00a0quite as confident<\/a>. Gutowski notes that while the Senate language is more expansive than what was approved by the House, which only dealt with suppressors, it’s likely more “vulnerable to an adverse ruling from the parliamentarian” because the language from the Finance Committee doesn’t separate the elimination of the tax requirement from the provisions delisting the NFA items.<\/p>\n

On Friday morning, Politico\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that MacDonough has given the thumbs down to several pieces of the Senate Banking Committee’s OBBB language, including measures meant to “zero out funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, slash some Federal Reserve employees\u2019 pay, cut Treasury\u2019s Office of Financial Research and dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.” Hopefully that’s not a sign of things to come when the parliamentarian takes her red pen to the Finance Committee’s language this weekend.<\/p>\n

In his piece, Gutowski also brings up a long-term issue with using reconciliation to remove items from the NFA. If the parliamentarian gives the green light to changing the NFA through a budget bill, there would be nothing to stop Democrats from using the same maneuver to put items onto the NFA list of restricted items, and even jack up the taxes beyond the $200 currently required. Imagine a budget bill that raises the NFA tax to $400, $600, or even $1,000, while also placing AR-15s and other semi-automatic long guns on the list of restricted firearms.<\/p>\n

I don’t think that is reason enough for Republicans to back down and voluntarily strip these provisions from the OBBB, but it’s something to keep in mind, and it’s another reason why the various lawsuits challenging aspects of the NFA are still incredibly important. There aren’t enough votes in the Senate to fully repeal or even modify the NFA in a standalone bill, but if we can weaken the NFA through litigation it will be far more difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to use future budget bills to raise NFA taxes or add to the list of restricted arms. If MacDonough rules the NFA language out of order, we won’t have to worry as much about Democrats using reconciliation to impose new gun controls, but the ongoing litigation will become an even more important tool for Second Amendment advocates to use against the NFA going forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

End to Taxes, Registration on Most NFA Items Faces a Weekend Byrd Bath Donald Trump has said he wants to see his One Big Beautiful Bill hit the Resolute desk in the Oval Office by July 4th, and though it remains to be seen whether Republicans in the House and Senate will be able to … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110821,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110820\/revisions\/110821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}