Reconciling Reconciliation
The Big Beautiful Tax Cut Bill is being held hostage by all the usual suspects.
Republicans are locked in one of those inside the beltway debates that only they and an opposition hoping to divide them pay attention to. Ostensibly, how to get ‘one big, beautiful bill’ to the President’s desk by summer.
Much of America is tuned out to the inside baseball over a reconciliation package that aims to preserve existing tax cuts, control federal spending, boost energy supplies and strengthen border security—but should it fail the country will start paying attention very quickly.
There’s trouble in the Senate over the House-passed version that calls for $1.5 trillion in budget reductions over a decade, without which spending will start to eat into the reauthorization of $4.5 trillion worth of tax relief in the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (TC&JA). And now that blood is in the water, a few political misfits in the lower house are rethinking their support as well.
It goes without saying that Democrats want to let the clock runout on TC&JA. Since many of its provisions expire at the end of the year, no action on the reconciliation bill means a massive tax hike on the American economy. That is, as usual, what liberals desire.
Yet what’s really threatening the domestic centerpiece of Trump’s second term is once again Republicans circling the wagons—and shooting inward. Having far less to do with principle and far more to do with self-preservation, GOP ‘moderates’ on the left and a few LINOs (‘libertarians in name only’) on the ‘right’ are holding the ‘one big beautiful bill’ hostage.
If it all sounds too familiar, it should.
This is exactly how our bill to repeal and replace Obamacare in Trump’s first term failed. As I wrote in Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press, the same toxic one-two punch from purists in safe districts and never-Trumpers in blue ones culminated in the late Sen. John McCain’s coup de grâce, costing Republicans dearly in the 2018 midterms.