I've been writing a lot about this, and I've gone through my assessments. I got one significant thing wrong, and a hell of a lot right. I'll start with the wrong thing. Bob Corker. Yup, I was wrong about him. All along, I have been saying that there is no such thing as a Republican deficit-hawk. I have been telling you not to believe him, and that he'd vote yes. He voted no. He was the one Republican Senator to vote no, after my current favorite person-- Elizabeth MacDonough, The Reaver/Barbarian/Berserker Warrior and arch-nemesis of the GOP-- determined Corker's "deficit trigger" to be in violation of the Byrd rule. The phrase I kept using for Corker's supposed deficit-hawkery was, "I'll believe it when I see it."
I saw it. I believe it. In retirement, a member of Project GOP has a spine. And a name. His name is Robert Corker. Jeff Flake, on the other hand? Have you seen me mention that invertebrate? No. Why not? After all, he was standing right next to Corker during all of the latter's posturing on the deficit. Flake voted yes. What did Flake get? A promise that there would be some sort of... thing... to... talk... about DACA, and that Flake would be invited to participate in the talks. And in exchange for that, Flake voted yes. So, Flake got nothing. And in exchange, he voted yes.
That much was clear all along. That's why I never even bothered writing about Flake.
Still, I got Corker wrong.
He just didn't matter.
In the big picture, I've been telling you all along that this thing was likely to pass, and that the GOP was better positioned to pass a tax bill than they were a healthcare bill for the simple, basic reason that the party is unified in their desire to cut taxes. That is their raison d'etre (damn it, where are those fucking symbols in this text editor? Yes, I know what goes where...).
Anyway, how were they going to get there without Corker? They had a margin. Collins and Murkowski? Like I kept saying, they were clearly trying to get to yes because they agreed with the concept of the tax cuts. So, McConnell offered them whatever they wanted. And they voted yes. Both of 'em. The Drama Club? Ron Johnson got his drama in, and just like I told you, it was nothing. Rand Paul apparently got his drama in by voting against the initial budget resolution, but didn't feel the need to posture after that.
I'll admit to some minor error in that I expected a bit of silly, empty posturing by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee at the end, and that didn't happen. They were compliant all along. I guess McConnell slipped them some catnip.
McCain-- I didn't really make a firm prediction about him. I kept describing him as fickle because he is, but he didn't matter either. Once Collins and Murkowski decided to vote yes, McCain was irrelevant. He could have joined Corker without changing the outcome.
And here's the big one. Skinny repeal. The Republicans are repealing the individual mandate.
During the healthcare debate, all along, I was skeptical that they would pass a "repeal-and-replace" plan. The only thing I really thought could pass? Skinny repeal. Here's the link to the post I put up when McConnell proposed "skinny repeal."
In that post, I actually refused to assess the chances of passage because it was too hard. But, that's different from my general skepticism of everything before that, and then momentum started to build. It was only McCain's surprise decision to vote against "skinny repeal" that brought it down.
Then, as soon as Republicans introduced "skinny repeal" into the tax bill, I posted this. Once it got attached to the tax bill, I didn't see what could stop a repeal of the individual mandate. And here we are. The Senate just passed a tax bill repealing the individual mandate.
In theory, this thing still has to go through a House-Senate conference committee, and something could still change or collapse, but... no. This thing is going to pass, and the individual mandate is dead, dead, dead. The House might even just pass the Senate's bill and skip conference altogether. That is extremely dangerous, particularly with the cost-sharing subsidies cut off too. We are entering some really terrifying places in terms of healthcare because of all of the sabotage going on, but that's the subject for more posts later.
So the basic point here is that when a party gets unified control of government, it has at least some capacity to pass its agenda. The GOP failed on healthcare because they had no agenda. REPEAL OBAMACARE isn't an agenda. It's a slogan. They never had a replacement, and couldn't work anything out. From the very beginning, I pointed out that the most strategically sound approach would have been piecemeal bills that repealed individual parts so that they could declare victory every month or so without going through the hell of trying to figure out a replacement, which they could never do, given that Obamacare was the Republican alternative to HillaryCare back in the '90s.
They handled that whole thing stupidly. And it collapsed on them.
Taxes? Tax-cutting is the central tenet of Republican religion. The idea that they were going to fail to pass a tax cut was... It made no sense. What we did finally have demonstrated was that Republicans actually are willing to raise taxes on people they don't actually like. The bill does raise taxes on some people.
This is not true tax reform. This doesn't really simplify the tax code all that much. Why? That would have been hard work, and they wrote this idiotic, fucking bill yesterday! 'Cuz committees and hearings are a mug's game, apparently. It is a corporate tax cut. Surrounded by other shit to pay for some of the corporate tax cut.
Have you paid attention to the stock market lately? The S&P 500 is up 18% this year so far. Long-term, on average, the S&P returns about 8-10%. Why is the S&P doing so well? A lot of reasons. The markets are up across the globe, so you can't attribute all that much to anything within the US, but some portion of this is probably the expectation of tax rates on publicly-traded corporations going down. Within any given day, we saw the S&P responding to news on the tax bill, after all. And, this makes sense! Drop the tax rate from 35 to 20% and corporations make more money. Valuation goes up, and stock prices should reflect that. Who benefits from that?
Not the people whose taxes are going up.
I'm not accustomed to writing this. In 2001, the GOP cut everyone's taxes. How big of a tax cut you got was determined by how much money you made, and there was an absolutely plausible argument that there was a limit on how much of a tax cut you could get based on how much you were paying at the time. That argument is gone. The GOP is raising taxes on individuals to pay for a corporate tax cut. And not just raising taxes on the rich...
I have written this phrase before, but we are through the looking glass here. It is no longer quite right to say that tax-cutting is the GOP religion. Cutting taxes for certain people is the GOP religion. This wasn't the case in 2001. There were a lot of complaints that could have been made about that bill, but at least it actually was a tax cut for everyone who paid taxes.
This... isn't! Holy shit!
There is a term in microeconomics. The "axiom of revealed preferences." I can't crawl inside your head to know what you think. That's not even how it worked in Being John Malkovich. I can observe your choices and infer your preferences. The GOP prefers to raise taxes on the middle class if it means cutting corporate taxes.
Since I never really vacillated in my prediction that this would pass, I can't really say I'm surprised, but let's take a moment here and appreciate the holy shit-ness of this.
The Republican Party is raising taxes. They really are doing this. They are choosing, plainly, to raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for corporate tax cuts.
Yup. Really. Wow.