Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a big vote-a-rama today that will culminate with a roll call on a budget resolution. It’s not entirely clear that the vote will succeed, but it’s beginning to look that way now that they’ve secured the support of John McCain. Still, even the president isn’t overly confident.
Republicans are going for the big Budget approval today, first step toward massive tax cuts. I think we have the votes, but who knows?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 19, 2017
One sign that they don’t have any margin for error is that Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi came north to be present for the vote even though he clearly should be in his sick bed recovering from a nasty urological infection. He was disoriented in the Capitol Building yesterday and needed a staff member to show him the way to the Senate chamber. It looks likely that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky will vote against the resolution and the maximum number of votes the Republicans can lose is two. As of now, it only looks like they will lose one vote, assuming Cochran can remain conscious throughout the vote-a-rama and cast his vote at the end.
Two days ago, I wrote that the Senate Republicans, for their own good, should not approve this budget resolution because it will set them on a disastrous course. It almost appears that the president agrees with me, but the truth is that he has absolutely no idea what is going on.
I am not exaggerating. As you know, I’ve written more than a dozen pieces this year about the budget reconciliation process and how it can be used to pass tax cuts without the need to get any support from the Democrats in the Senate. I’ve consistently said that the process would either fail or, at best, produce something much smaller in scale than what the Republicans have promised. I’ve repeatedly advised Trump to abandon the effort and work with the Ranking Member of the Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, to craft a bipartisan bill. I’ve also advised him to couple that with a bipartisan effort to get an infrastructure bill.
In a vacuum, then, I’d praise Trump for what he did yesterday.
President Donald Trump suggested at a meeting with senators Wednesday that the Senate create a bipartisan working group for tax reform, surprising Republicans who’ve been planning to pass a party-line bill, senators said afterward.
As the Senate worked to advance a budget that would set up a partisan tax reform bill on Wednesday, the president repeatedly indicated at a lunch with senators from both parties that he wanted a bipartisan process headed by Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), senators said. While everyone in the room nodded along with Trump’s hopes for bipartisanship, there was no agreement among senators to actually create such a group, which is viewed by some Republicans as redundant to the existing Finance Committee…
…Trump also suggested his tax reform effort will generate so much revenue that it will pay for a massive infrastructure bill, according to one senator in attendance. The senator came away with the impression that Trump is eager to cut a massive deal with Democrats on taxes and infrastructure.
That the president was talking this way on the eve of the big vote in the Senate on the budget resolution indicates that he doesn’t understand what the vote on the budget resolution is intended to do. Yet, there’s that tweet up above from this morning that shows that he’s fully aware that the vote today is “the first step toward massive tax cuts.”
The Republicans’ reaction to the president was 101 proof mystification. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas politely pointed out that the Finance Committee is adequate to work on a tax bill and that creating a “bipartisan working group” would be redundant. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who sits on the Finance Committee, said “It’s always helpful to have a broad discussion, but we’re also not going to change our schedule. We’re going to get this done.” The committee chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, expressed extreme skepticism about a bipartisan process: “It depends. Sometimes you have people are very sincere. And sometimes you have people playing politics all the time. If you get one of those, it’s tougher. This is touchy stuff here.”
These folks have been setting up today’s vote for months, and the entire premise of the whole process, from beginning to end, was that it would allow them to completely exclude the Democrats. To have the president undermine that premise on the day before the vote has them wanting to commit ritual suicide on the Senate floor.
Here’s the deal. The reason they’re voting on a budget resolution today is so that they can attach budget reconciliation instructions to it that will allow them to pass a tax bill without worrying about a filibuster. If they want a bipartisan bill, then they need to scrap this plan entirely. No Democratic senators are going to vote for a tax bill that is pushed through using the budget reconciliation process because it not only cuts them out of the negotiations (that’s the whole point) but it also limits their ability to debate the bill or offer amendments. Moreover, if Trump wants to couple the tax cuts with an infrastructure bill, he really can’t do that with the budget reconciliation process because he’ll need to overcome a filibuster to get the infrastructure half of it done. Plus, the way the Republicans have frame-worked their tax plan will blow a huge whole in the budget rather than providing extra revenue for roads, bridges, and airports.
If Trump wanted to go this way, and it’s a completely sensible way to go, he needed to have this meeting months ago instead of yesterday. And if he just recently came to the conclusion that this was a good plan, then he ought to be asking McConnell to scrap today’s vote rather than tweeting about how he hopes the resolution passes.
Alternatively, he could tell them to go ahead and pass the budget resolution but to put it in their back pocket to use in case of emergency. But he isn’t doing any of these things because he does not have any comprehension of what is going on around him.
Imagine the scene yesterday as the whole Senate Finance Committee was sitting in the White House conversing with a president who did not know any of their concerns. Ron Wyden was on point when he said, “You look at the [Republican proposal] and you see this Grand Canyon-sized gap. I said, ‘The real challenge, Mr. President, is that there is a very big gap between the rhetoric and the reality that is on a piece of paper.’”
In other words, Wyden was politely pointing out that if the president wants a bipartisan working group, he shouldn’t be wasting everyone’s time demanding a vote on a budget resolution that will authorize a tax bill that no Democrat can or will support. If he wants an infrastructure bill, he can’t go this route. If anything the president was saying was true, everything the Republicans in Congress are and have been doing on taxes should be set aside.
But, for the most part, the senators were too befuddled by the nonsense they were hearing from Donald Trump to know what to say. They might as well have been talking to some guy at the bus station who mutters to himself.
If this vote will send Senate Republicans down a disastrous (for them) path, why are they working so hard on it? Surely some of them understand political consequences, and made the calculation that this is the least damaging outcome for them? What’re those Senators thinking?
Fyre Festival Organizer: ‘Let’s Just Do It and Be Legends’
Ha! I hope you’re right, and they’re trapped in the Senate without port-o-potties.
you’re a major league baseball player visiting a nine year old kid in the cancer ward. he’s ask you to hit five homers in your next game, and you foolishly promise him that you will do this for him.
do you go out and try to hit five homers or do you ask the manager not to play you?
this is the kind of promise and the kind of disappointment we’re dealing with here between the officeholders and their donors.
So their calculation is, ‘better to get points for trying!’
That strikes me as perfectly reasonable. When they fail, they can point the finger.
You cork your bat, and when that doesn’t work you accuse the opposing picture of throwing spit balls because that liberal pitcher hates sick children, like all liberals do. Then you win the next election because your voters think you love children most of all.
I think that sums up about 26 of the last 30 years of politics in this country.
The Republicans were hired to get big tax cuts for the very wealthy. A bipartisan bill won’t have that, so they have no interest in it. If they can’t get something through, they’ll be fired (see Bannon using Mercer money to recruit their replacements.) This is their only shot, so they are doing it.
I do think they’ll get something through, even if it’s just repealing the estate tax. My expected scenario at this point is that they fail to settle on anything until after the election, and then pass a fairly nasty package in the lame duck.
After 40+ years of “Lafferable” tax-cuts-that-never-pay-for-themselves, there are probably a few GOP Congress critters that know that the tax cuts lead to explosive growth is nonsense. But a) this is is the most fundamental article of faith in the GOP and so they will always do it when they have all the power no matter how disastrous the consequences and b) the billionaire donors have made tax cuts for them conditional on opening their spigots for the 2018 mid-terms. But, you’re correct, Trump not only does not understand any part of the legislative process but, surprisingly, little of the political process as well.
This whole situation is horrible. The congressional leaders are so much more sane than Trump (who is every inch as baffled and ignorant as BooMan describes), that it’s easy to forget that their “plan” is based on the most ridiculous, debunked, destructive supply-side claptrap to begin with.
I used to think that the donor class cynically exploited Lauffer-curve “voodoo” because it worked as a mechanism for getting votes and support, even if they privately understood they were just manipulating the government to cash themselves out.
But I’ve come to understand that they really mean it — they actually believe their Randian nonsense about how they deserve and need the financial incentive (to “create jobs”) while low-income Americans must have their benefits reduced so they’ll work harder. It’s insane.
The elected class mostly did exploit it but the donor class has always, believed it. Rich people have believed similar things since this country was founded.
I’ve noticed over the years as a general principle that people (not all people, but many) believe in whatever is in their best interest to believe, and its pretty damned hard to convince them otherwise.
Tweak:
*Shouldn’t require arguing the case that they are quite frequently wrong in thinking this. Nearly always wrong, if you’re looking at the big picture and long term, when they believe something that’s false. Eventually, Reality bites.
The Original Version:
Agreed.
Agreed.
Trump might be a moron, but I think he’s got the general gist that the GOP can’t easily get things done and won’t do things that will help “his people”. He knows that it’s all smoke and mirrors, that’s his secret sauce.
I think it partly explains his pattern of going back and forth on everything. Even he knows it’s gonna be a wreck, and he knows he can’t do anything to help or to stop it. Plus he doesn’t care in the first, this is all someone else’s job anyway.
So he starts sending out tweets and making statement blaming everyone for the situation, BEFORE it has even finished failing. He’s so allergic to “failure” and he’ll say anything to try and place himself above it all, even when it make the fail more failsome.
I think this is generous to a fault.
Yes, his “instincts” are to instantly lie and cast blame elsewhere and praise himself, but these are the “instincts” of a used car salesman, not an effective politician. The fact that his supporters are as ignorant as he is — and, therefore, are getting a vicarious thrill from watching him step into Washington as proxies for themselves and say the same nasty stuff and be as baffled and contemptuous as they would be — is not in any way a good quality (or even an advantageous quality) for Trump; it’s more like a scathing indictment of how badly the entire conservative project in this country has calcified, eroded and flat-out rotted.
George W. Bush and his team (especially Cheney, for obvious reasons) scared me to death because they understood how Washington worked, so they could successfully undermine its protective systems — people like John Woo and “Scooter” Libby were instrumental in rolling back decades of oversight and forbearance, and the results were catastrophic.
As bad as things are now, I’d rather have this than a return to those days. Trump’s inability to understand anything going on around him makes his administration pathetic when it has to act (Puerto Rico, etc.) but it also wrecks the conservative agenda, which is a good thing.
Giving Trump credit for managing (in the eyes of the most ignorant amongst us) to stay “above the fray” and deflect blame while demanding praise, is to not give credit at all. Just as in The Art of the Deal, we’re supposed to applaud him for promoting himself — he expects us to champion him for winning the White House and for his irreverence, as if he’s the beloved main character in a story we’re all enthralled by. That’s the way he thinks; the only way he can think. Applauding his “ability” to turn every governmental struggle into an anecdote about his own “victory” is a terrible weakness, not a strength.
We need look no further than Kansas, where Gov. Brownback has laid waste to the state with his trickle down tax cut experiment, to understand what the Trump/GOP tax cut plan will do:
The Great Kansas Tax Cut Experiment Crashes And Burns
https:/www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2017/06/07/the-great-kansas-tax-cut-experiment-crashes-and-burn
s#c9cefe75508f
Brownback even had Arthur Laffer advising him:
“Arthur Laffer, the economist who elevated supply-side policies during the Reagan years, consulted with Brownback in 2012 when he pushed tax cuts to stimulate the Kansas economy. Laffer said Wednesday that he would have preferred to reduce pass-through taxes rather than wiping them out.”
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article154962419.html
The nutters, some of whom still think the world is flat, believe this nonsense. But the serious people on the right always knew insisting that cutting taxes would generate revenue and “create jobs” was the con job they needed to perpetrate in order to pass bills that would essentially transfer public wealth to the top, and put more of a tax burden on the middle and working classes. They know it doesn’t work. But their marching orders from their owners doesn’t include creating jobs or expanding the economy. They just want to pay even less in taxes. And the programs that benefit the working and middle classes must be cut to provide revenue for the tax cuts.
Interestingly, Laffer was/is an adviser to Trump, and their tax “reform” will do the same thing to the nation that Brownback’s “experiment” did to Kansas.
Given the trends and BooMan’s assurance that this will royally screw up GOP prospects for the future. (They own the exploding deficit, which now doesn’t matter.)
Given that, I’m at the point of shouting:
JUMP, LEMMINGS. JUMP!
Reckon that the appearance of Democratic enthusiasm for their going it alone makes them them think or incentivizes them in irrationality?
Bring in the cheerleaders. Please let’s not interrupt what promises to be a great party.
It sounds like Trump is trying to give Republicans room to vote no, which would be smart actually, and therefore out of character for Trump. But this talk of a bipartisan tax bill is nonsense. The Dems can play along for appearances, but they have to stick to their guns on deficit-neutrality and no breaks for the rich. Since breaks for the rich is the whole point for the Republicans, what compromise is possible? Some insubstantial tweaking so they did something? Dems should not go for that either, as there will be a cost to cooperating with Republicans with their own base.
The bipartisan route is also a trap for Republicans, unless the Dems are stupid enough to make it a trap for themselves. For one thing, it enables the Dems to steal the deficit issue, which is a real issue, albeit one that could not be a priority when we were trying to recover from a financial crisis.
This is a stay away game and enjoying the popcorn.
Does this scheme include repealing the ACA in addition to creating a framework for tax cuts? I can’t bear to go online to find out. This blog is the only sane place I know.
I wouldn’t even use the stopped clock analogy to describe Trump here. When he is right about something not having to do with bigotry or conning people its usually in ways he doesn’t understand and/or is not, for him, repeatable from a strategic perspective.
The good news is that Trump not only adds little value to the planning and implementation of the legislative evil the GOP congress salivates over, but can be a hindrance in ways he doesn’t understand.
I don’t know why they are bothering with reconciliation on the tax cuts. They are not going to pass permanent cuts. They are going to pass tax cuts that will sunset after 10 years just like the 2001 Bush tax cuts. They could probably have done that if they went to Democrats months ago and proposed a bi-partisan bill.
Instead they will pass a piece of crap and then boast about how huge these cuts are for the middle class. Then the media point out they are lying. The CBO scores it horribly. Then Trump and Fox News go on the offensive about “Fake News.” Then Trump says something outrageous that offends everybody and focuses all media attention on himself for a week. So, everybody forgets all about the tax bill until the 2018 campaign. During this campaign GOP simply lies about what’s in the bill. By the time people don’t actually get any significant tax savings, it’s August 2018 at the earliest, when people who have filed for an extension have to file their return.
Nothing to see here. Move it along!
None at all.