One of the reasons Speaker Paul Ryan has made himself a lame duck leader, retired but sticking around for the rest of the session, might be that he wants to do another massive tax cut this summer. There's a hitch, however. The Senate.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is under pressure to block a vote, which Republican campaign strategists worry could allow red-state Democrats to vote for additional tax cuts and undermine one of the GOP’s most effective lines of attack in conservative-leaning states: that Democrats voted against a big tax cut last December.
“That’s a very serious concern, and Senator McConnell is going to have to decide what happens in the Senate,” said Ryan Ellis, senior tax adviser with the conservative Family Business Coalition.
The underwhelming benefit that most people who are not filthy rich or corporations means that the tax cuts aren't particularly popular and not a good bet for Republicans to be running on this fall. In fact, just this week a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 36 percent of respondents thought it was a bad idea, while just 27 percent thought it was a good idea. The fact that the cut for regular people was so anemic and only temporary at that has prompted House Republicans to want to take another stab at it. Because what's another trillion or so to the deficit at this point?
The Senate? Not so much. "Of course we would like to make the individual tax cuts permanent," McConnell said. "We may. We'll take a look at it, yes." Or not.
Another Republican strategist closely involved in Senate campaigns said that officials with the National Republican Senate Committee were urging McConnell not to hold a vote on individual tax cut permanence out of concern for the benefit to endangered Democrats. The strategist also requested anonymity to discuss the deliberations.
This time around, the Senate would have a hurdle of 60 votes, because they have not passed a budget reconciliation bill as they did with last year's bill. The resolution allowed them to do the initial bill with a simple majority vote in the Senate. Getting on the whole Republican caucus to hold together now and adding 10 Democrats to the mix seems like a very difficult lift for McConnell.
As tenuous as his majority is right now, he's going to be under a lot of pressure to not wade back into that complicated mess. Which means one more big skirmish in the Republican civil war, which is only good news for Democrats.
Help beat Mitch McConnell's majority and take back the Senate. Chip in $3 to win back the Senate.