[NFBMT] The New York Times: Senate Republicans Pass Sweeping Tax Bill

[Bruce&Joy Breslauer]

We watched C-Span until after eleven last night, and figured they would go
deep into the morning hours.  A motion which made perfect sense to me, to
adjourn until Monday at noon so the legislators could have time to read
through the last-minute changes being proposed before voting on them, was
defeated.  There were some that were upset that these changes were given to
lobbyists and posted on the Internet before they were made available to the
whole Senate.  This didn't seem to matter.

 

The New York Times

Politics

 

Senate Republicans Pass Sweeping Tax Bill

WASHINGTON - The Senate passed the most sweeping tax rewrite in decades early
Saturday, with Republicans lining up to approve an overhaul that will touch
almost every corner of the United States economy, affecting families, small
business owners and multinational corporations, with the biggest benefits
flowing to the highest-earning Americans.

 

Senators voted 51-49, as Republicans approved the nearly 500-page bill in the
early morning hours after lawmakers received a rewritten version, which
contained significant changes from the original bill that passed two Senate
panels last month along party lines.

 

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and Kentucky Republican, called
it "a great day for the country."

 

The president praised Republican lawmakers on Saturday morning on Twitter,
saying, "Biggest Tax Bill and Tax Cuts in history just passed in the Senate.
Now these great Republicans will be going for final passage. Thank you to
House and Senate Republicans for your hard work and commitment!"

 

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said in a statement that
with Senate approval "we will move quickly to a conference committee so we
can get a final bill to President Trump's desk."

 

The last-minute revisions prompted an outcry from Democrats, who said it was
impossible - and irresponsible - for lawmakers to read and digest a
significant piece of legislation in such a short period of time.

 

Speaking on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, Senator Chuck Schumer,
Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called the Republican approach
"a process and a product that no one can be proud of and everyone should be
ashamed of."

 

He went on to warn that changes made to the bill "under the cover of
darkness" would "stuff even more money into the pockets of the wealthy and
the biggest corporations while raising taxes on millions in the middle
class."

 

Many of the changes stemmed from a series of last-minute agreements reached
to convince a handful of holdout Republican senators, including Susan Collins
of Maine and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to throw their support behind the
legislation. One of those Republican holdouts, Senator Bob Corker of
Tennessee, voted against the legislation.

 

Early on Saturday morning, Mr. Pence provided a tiebreaking vote to pass an
amendment offered by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, that would allow
people to use up to $10,000 a year from tax-advantaged 529 savings accounts
to fund tuition at private and religious K-12 schools or certain educational
expenses for home-schooled students. Right now, such accounts can only be
used to pay for higher education.

 

The bill's approval, coming on the heels of the House passing its own tax
bill last month, is the first significant legislative victory for the
Republican Party since it assumed control of the House, Senate and White
House in 2017. The lightning-fast trajectory of the bill and the ability to
overcome - or ignore - objections that have bedeviled previous attempts to
revamp the tax code, highlights the pressure Republican leaders faced to
notch a victory after several failed legislative efforts this year.

 

Republicans have pitched the bill as a middle-class tax cut and the overhaul
is intended to immediately cut taxes for about 70 percent of middle-class
families. But it would raise them on millions of others, since the Senate
plan eliminates some tax breaks like the deduction for state and local income
taxes and phases out the individual tax cuts at the end of 2025.

 

Businesses fare far better, with the corporate tax rate cut to 20 percent
from 35 percent and made permanent. It also offers a large tax break for the
owners of small businesses and other companies that are not organized as
traditional corporations, a provision that was sweetened in a last-minute
deal to bring two wavering senators on board.

 

Democrats opposed the tax bill as a bloc, saying it was meant to help the
wealthy and not the middle class. With the Senate split 52 to 48, Republicans
barely had votes to spare. But the bill's passage was made possible by a
near-complete Republican embrace of the idea that about $1.5 trillion of tax
cuts will pay for themselves, by producing enough economic growth and
additional federal revenue to offset their costs to the Treasury.

 

That belief was contradicted by several studies, including one from
Congress's official economic scorekeeper, which Republicans dismissed as
overly pessimistic.

 

Mr. McConnell waved off any deficit concerns. "I'm totally confident this is
a revenue-neutral bill," he said. "I think it's going to be a revenue
producer."

 

The House and Senate will now work quickly to resolve the differences between
their bills and deliver a plan to President Trump's desk, with the aim of
delivery by Christmas.

 

Congressional leaders raced the bill through the House and the Senate in a
month, with a crush of changes coming in the 11th hour as Senate leadership
worked to address the concerns of a few lawmakers whose support was critical
to passage. Several changes were included to satisfy Ms. Collins, including a
provision that will allow taxpayers to deduct up to $10,000 in state and
local property taxes paid and allowing lower-income individuals to claim the
medical expense deduction.

 

In the late afternoon, Ms. Collins announced her support for the bill, citing
those changes as well as a promise from Mr. McConnell that he would support
two bipartisan bills meant to help stabilize individual insurance markets
under the Affordable Care Act. Ms. Collins had expressed concern about a
provision in the tax bill to repeal the act's mandate that most Americans
have insurance or pay a penalty.

 

Lawmakers also included a more generous tax break for companies organized as
pass-through entities, a provision needed to win the support of Mr. Johnson
and Senator Steve Daines of Montana.

 

And, in a bid to get Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona on board, leaders agreed
to work on providing "fair and permanent protections" for the beneficiaries
of an Obama-era effort that protects young undocumented immigrants from
deportation, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, Mr.
Flake said.

 

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee had pushed to scale back the tax cuts to
avoid adding to the deficit. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times  

 

"There are no ironclad commitments - at this date we're going have a bill -
but I am confident," Mr. Flake said. "I've always been convinced on DACA that
the president's instincts are better than the advice he's getting."

 

Mr. Flake, an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, said he had spoken with Vice
President Mike Pence about the issue. "We had a long conversation last night
and today, and he committed to start working with me on this," Mr. Flake
said.

 

Mr. Flake also said he had won changes in a provision, which expires after
five years, to allow companies to immediately deduct new investment expenses,
which he called a "gimmick."

 

The bill would also open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to
oil and gas drilling, putting environmental activists on the brink of defeat
in what has been a decades-long battle. Opening the wildlife refuge to energy
exploration has been a goal of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska.

 

Several of the changes, most notably the property tax break and the
additional deduction for pass-through businesses, combined to add several
hundred billion dollars to the cost of the bill. To offset them, party
leaders scaled back some planned tax cuts and increased a new tax on assets
held overseas by American multinational companies.

 

Most notably, they decided to maintain the alternative minimum tax on
corporations and to trim the effects of the alternative minimum tax for
high-earning individuals. Originally, the bill would have eliminated both
those taxes entirely.

 

None of those changes were likely to improve the fiscal cost of the bill - in
defiance of the concerns that several senators had raised about adding to
future deficits.

 

Chief among those worried about the deficit was Mr. Corker, whose fears over
the bill's effect on the federal budget deficit created last-minute
complications for Republican leaders on Thursday when he demanded changes to
the bill.

 

Mr. Corker had pushed to scale back the tax cuts after a report from the
congressional Joint Committee on Taxation that projected the bill would add
$1 trillion to deficits over a decade, even after accounting for economic
growth.

 

Republicans said Mr. Corker had angered colleagues and overplayed his hand in
the wake of that analysis. Mr. Corker was alarmed by the projections. But
many of his colleagues greeted them with distrust, both because they expected
tax cuts to generate more robust economic growth than the forecasters
projected and because they felt burned by unflattering analyses of their
health care proposals issued this year by the Congressional Budget Office.

 

The joint committee sprinted to complete its analysis of the Senate bill
before the vote, having failed to complete one of the House version before it
was passed two weeks after its introduction. Still, Republicans wondered why
the analysis arrived on Thursday, the day the Senate was originally scheduled
to vote, a leadership aide said on Friday.

 

The timing and the scoring of the analysis generated a lot of suspicion, the
aide said.

 

Mr. Corker pointed to the analysis to push for rolling back of some of the
tax cuts after several years, to reduce the bill's cost, but many of his
colleagues revolted over that idea. Republican leaders decided on Thursday
night to drop efforts to appease Mr. Corker and instead sweeten their offer
to Mr. Daines and Mr. Johnson, by offering to allow pass-through owners to
deduct 23 percent of their business income, up from 17.4 percent in the
original bill.

 

Previously, the leaders had offered a deduction of 20 percent. The increase
to 23 was enough to get both men on board.

 

"After weeks of fighting for Main Street businesses including Montana's
farmers and ranchers, I've decided to support the Senate tax cut bill, which
provides significant tax relief for Main Street businesses," Mr. Daines said
in a statement Friday morning.

 

Mr. Johnson followed with his own pledge of support.

 

"I wanted more," he said, "but I'm a reasonable human being."

 

Mr. Johnson had helped give a scare to Republican leaders on Thursday, as he,
Mr. Corker and Mr. Flake withheld their votes as Republicans were trying to
kill a Democratic motion to relegate the bill back to a Senate panel.

 

"Senator Corker called me and said, 'Why shouldn't we vote for that one?'"
Mr. Johnson recalled on Friday.

 

"There's always parliamentary maneuvers, right?" he said. "So we didn't
vote."

 

Recounting how the vote played out, Mr. Johnson said, "I was just kind of
biding my time." Eventually, he said, a Republican colleague, Rob Portman of
Ohio, came over to see what could be done.

 

The deal to sweeten the tax break for pass-through businesses came together
later that night, as Mr. Johnson, Mr. Daines and Senator Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina met with Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate
Republican, in his Capitol office to make a case to Senate leadership.

 

"There's a lot of competing interests," Mr. Johnson said, likening the bill
to a Rubik's Cube.

 

"I guess they put that Rubik's Cube together," he added.

 

While Ms. Collins publicly remained undecided on the bill over the past week,
Republican leaders were confident they would bring her on board. She made her
demands clear early in the process, and she actively negotiated with the
leadership until the day of the vote.

 

Democrats warned on Friday that Republicans were making a political mistake
with a bill that would increase taxes on some middle-class families.

 

"It'll be a dramatic turning point in a downward spiral for the Republicans,"
Mr. Schumer said.

 

Debt Concerns, Once a Core Republican Tenet, Take a Back Seat to Tax Cuts 

 

The party, which criticized the growth of the federal debt under President
Barack Obama, has rallied behind a tax cut that would send it to new heights.

 

Republicans Near a Big Win - but Will It Lift Them Politically? 

 

Senate passage of a trillion-dollar tax cut will be a much-needed Republican
victory, but it remains to be seen whether it lifts them out of their
political ditch.

 

A Hasty, Hand-Scribbled Tax Bill Sets Off an Outcry

 

WASHINGTON - By midafternoon on Friday, Republicans had the votes to pass
their tax bill in the Senate. What they did not have was a bill.

 

The legislation, covering nearly 500 pages, finally surfaced well after the
sun had set. It appeared first in the lobbying shops of K Street, which sent
back copies to some Democrats in the Senate, who took to social media to
protest being asked to vote in a matter of hours on a bill that had yet to be
shared with them directly.

 

The drafts that leaked to journalists included changes scrawled in looping
handwriting in the margins. Democrats posted screenshots and accompanying
complaints. Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, called it "Washington
D.C. at its worst" in a video in which he held up a page of the bill with the
changes.

 

"This is unbelievable, we're doing massive tax reform on an absolute
incredible timeline," he said. "This is going to affect everybody in this
country."

 

With Republicans intent on passing a bill along party lines, public protests
have been Democrats' only weapon throughout the lightning-fast progression of
the bill over the last month. The minority party has no ability to stop the
bill, because Republicans are employing a Senate tactic that allows them to
bypass a Democratic filibuster. The first version of the tax plan was
introduced in the House on Nov. 1 and approved two weeks later; the Senate is
on course to match that pace.

 

That would be a compressed schedule in any event, but it was particularly so
on Friday, as Republicans inserted several last-second amendments to secure
majority support for their bill. Democrats could only scold and work up a
frenzy on social media

 

Some senators began sharing images of the legislation, which included
handwritten additions along the margins. 

 

In a separate video, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts,
held up a stack of legislative text and tried to read the changes that the
Republicans had made. She struggled to make sense of the garbled language and
lamented that she could not possibly read the bill in the hour or so before
the expected vote.

 

"I just want to give you an idea of how the Republican leadership thinks
we're supposed to make laws in the United States Senate," Ms. Warren said.
"Don't let anybody read it. Just cram through what you want to cram through."

 

Republicans were unsympathetic. When Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon,
raised a similar complaint on the floor, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,
the majority leader, assured him that there would be "plenty of time" to read
the bill - after it passed the chamber and headed to a conference committee
with the House.

 

Democrats took particular offense to the way the final amendments to the bill
were distributed. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri posted a list of them
on her Twitter account and cried foul over the fact that she received a draft
from a lobbyist, not from her colleagues across the aisle.

 

"None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it," Ms. McCaskill wrote.
"Need I say more?"

 

The bill was still evolving late Friday night, as the Senate parliamentarian
struck some provisions from the bill. Before a final round of votes on
amendments, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority
leader, rose to deliver a final, scowling rebuke of the process, which he
called "reckless ramrodding."

 

"Republicans are reaching heretofore unreached heights of hypocrisy," Mr.
Schumer said, "and the Senate is descending to a new low of chicanery."

 

Shortly after he finished, senators began voting on a series of amendments,
leading into the final vote on the bill. By late evening, the bill was
finally posted online - handwriting and all.

 

Joy Breslauer, President

National Federation of the Blind of Montana 

Web Site: http://www.nfbofmt.org <http://www.nfbofmt.org/> 

 

Live the life you want

 

The National Federation of the Blind is a community of members and friends
who believe in the hopes and dreams of the nation's blind. Every day we work
together to help blind people live the lives they want.