House Republican leaders are pushing for a vote on a second tax bill—one that they know has no chance of becoming law in 2018—but some of their most vulnerable members aren’t happy. The oh-so-sneaky Republican plan is that, since voters realized that the first Republican tax law was just a giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, this time the House will pass a bill that looks like it would benefit middle-class families. But since the Senate won’t even hold a vote on the bill this year, Republicans won’t risk it becoming law—they’ll just use it as a cudgel against Democrats who voted against it in the House.
The first Republican tax scam isn’t generally popular with voters, and it’s a particular problem for House Republicans from blue states that were targeted by the bill. Around a dozen of them voted against that first tax law because it would hurt their constituents, and now:
Some of those GOP lawmakers have openly said they would prefer to leave the tax issue alone as Congress also grapples with how to fund the government and the House potentially votes on health care measures that might be more politically beneficial to vulnerable incumbents. “If we were to pass that here in the House, it would be an exercise in futility, because it could never pass in the Senate,” Rep. Leonard Lance of New Jersey, who opposed the first bill, said Friday on CNBC.
Well, duh. The point is to make Democrats look bad, not actually pass a law! Sure, Republicans would be fine with making individual tax cuts permanent—it would do more to break the government than it would to help working families, after all—but they’ve made clear that that’s not the priority. As former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn said, “The part of tax reform to me that was so important was really the corporate side.” Or as a Heritage Foundation fellow said: “My feeling is that it’s fine. It is certainly smart to make the tax cuts permanent, but it is not urgent, because those don’t expire for many years.”
The urgency is political, and aimed at November’s elections. If voters had fallen for Republican claims about the tax law they already passed, this big House Republican priority wouldn’t be on the map at all.