Campaign Action
Donald Trump looks to be delivering yet another goose egg on the Republican agenda—tax reform is currently on life support, a partial casualty of Trump’s ongoing refusal to share his own tax returns with the public.
In fact, the problem both starts and ends at the White House door step. For starters, the administration has no tax reform plan to even sell at this point. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin admitted as much Monday, dashing his own August deadline as "not realistic." And the longer the issue waits, the tougher that vote will be. If it bleeds into next year, Republican lawmakers won’t be thinking about anything other than how their vote will play in the midterms.
Meanwhile, Paul Ryan's "border adjustment" tax—intended to raise $1 trillion in revenues that would buy the GOP room to craft a revenue-neutral tax plan—is DOA, with large companies and Koch-backed special interest groups alike vehemently opposing it.
Finally, so long as no one can discern how a tax overhaul would pad Trump's bottom line, Democrats aren't about to give Republicans any extra votes to help make up for a GOP shortfall. In fact, the issue animated progressive activists again last weekend, with tens of thousands turning out at tax marches across the country. Alan Rappeport writes:
“When they talk about tax reform, are they talking about cutting Donald Trump’s taxes by millions of dollars a year?” asked Ezra Levin, a member of the Tax March executive committee. “We don’t know.” [...]
In the halls of Congress, Democrats are employing procedural maneuvers to drive home their point on the tax returns and possibly compel Republican lawmakers to join their effort to force Mr. Trump to release them. And Democratic aides say more tricks are coming.
More than a dozen Republicans — from recognizable names like Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa and Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina to backbenchers like Representatives David Young of Iowa, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, Ted Yoho of Florida, Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Justin Amash of Michigan — have agreed that Mr. Trump should release his returns.
The White House, tone deaf as ever, again dug its heels in on the issue Monday, as press secretary Sean Spicer left open the possibility that taxpayers might "never" see Trump's tax returns.
If you can't get Democrats on board and even Republicans are feeling the heat, then you've got no legislative path forward—especially for a plan that hasn’t even debuted yet. Republicans will be lucky to pass a simple tax cut package along party lines that, per budget rules, would have to sunset within a decade.
But for now, GOP dreams of overhauling the tax code to permanently advantage America’s richest at the expense of our poorest appears to be as likely as a unicorn brigade taking flight over the White House.