Regardless, important things are happening in Congress. Remember how I've been saying that the GOP would have an easier time on taxes than on healthcare? They've been having a little difficulty getting the budget resolution together, but the Senate just passed the House's budget. Yes, this is technical, but it really matters.
Reminder: the Republicans are doing everything through "budget resolution" because a budget resolution bill can't be filibustered in the Senate. Debate times are automatically set by the rules of budget resolution, so the minority party can't just refuse to yield the floor and vote against cloture because no cloture motion is necessary to end debate. Debate just cuts off automatically.
Sorry. Technical stuff. Presumably, if you are reading a political scientist's blog, you are here for some technical shit on occasion. But hey, jazz goes up tonight!
One of the necessary steps in this is the passage of that budget resolution. The GOP has been having some difficulty with the resolution, and that could have spelled trouble for their tax goals. I never bought into the idea that they'd fail on the budget resolution, though. On the other hand, if they were completely unified, this would have been easier.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I expect the tax issue to play out differently from healthcare, but the devil is in the details. Now that the GOP has a procedural map for what to do, it is all about ironing out those details and sorting out those devils. With that in mind, here are a few reminders before I get into what's next:
1) Tax cuts versus tax reform. A tax reform bill means lowering rates while eliminating deductions in order to keep revenues constant. It is, conceptually (generally speaking), revenue-neutral. The degree to which you can lower rates depends on the degree to which you eliminate deductions. Deductions are popular, nobody in the GOP congressional delegation really wants to eliminate any major deductions, so this won't happen. They just want to cut taxes.
2) Under reconciliation rules, that means limiting the tax cuts to a) expire in 10 years because you can't increase the deficit for more than 10 years under the Byrd rule, and b) the reconciliation instructions put a cap on the degree of deficit expansion permitted.
3) That puts the GOP at war with itself on whose taxes get cut. Income taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes... We have a lot of different taxes, and different Members of Congress have different priorities. Basically every Republican in Congress hates taxes, and regardless of what they say about the deficit, stick a deficit-increasing tax cut in front of them, and until they demonstrate otherwise, my default assumption is that any GOP legislator who claims to oppose deficit-increasing tax cuts is a fuckin' liar. Yeah, John McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts long ago, but he was just pissed at Bush over the 2000 election. Then again, he hates Trump, and he seems to be checking items off his bucket list.
Regardless, the budget passed the Senate, and it did so because Republicans support the concept of tax cuts. In the case of healthcare, the problem was the "replace" part of "repeal-and-replace." It never meant a fuckin' thing. It was a word added to "repeal" once the protections for pre-existing conditions, etc. went into effect because a simple repeal stopped being politically viable, but the party never had any clue what even the rough outlines of a replacement plan might be. And they didn't even really start until after Trump's surprise victory, and even then, they skipped anything like a normal legislative process with hearings, mark-up, etc. That was the problem. They never had even a common concept for "replace." That's not true with taxes. They support tax cuts, regardless of what the people who claim to be deficit hawks say. They may simply have different priorities on which taxes get cut.
So, given that the resolution passed the Senate, in order for the Republicans to fail on taxes, at least two people have to flip. The resolution passed 51-49. With Pence, they can lose two of those 51 and still pass something. Two of those 51 have to decide, "yeah, I like the idea of cutting taxes, but this specific set of tax cuts isn't the set of droids I'm looking for." So, unless someone jedi mind-tricks them, the only way the GOP fails is if they screw up the process of putting together the jigsaw puzzle of a constrained set of tax cuts.
They could! They have $1.5 trillion to spread around, and not everyone has the same priorities. At the end of the process, though, there will be a bill, and anyone who votes no will be voting to keep taxes at their current rates, versus a package of tax cuts worth $1.5 trillion.
Everybody kind of has a thing. John Coltrane played the saxophone. Trump lies. Republicans? They cut taxes. It's what they do.
