The lawmakers attracting the most concern from leadership and the White House are Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who say the current version of the bill favors corporations over other businesses.
.. Currently, in the Senate bill, these companies are allowed to deduct 17.4 percent of their income from their tax liability. Negotiators are looking at expanding that credit up to about 20 percent
.. their tax plan does not allow individuals, families, and pass-through companies to deduct their state and local taxes from their taxable income. The tax plan does allow firms that pay corporate income taxes to deduct their state and local taxes.
.. To create more parity, negotiators are considering putting new curbs on the ability of corporations to deduct state and local taxes from their income.
.. a change requested by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), which would allow Americans to deduct $10,000 in local property taxes from their taxable income.
.. Making this change could cost more than $100 billion over 10 years
.. But Johnson is on the budget panel, and he could demand changes by Tuesday in order to win his vote. If he blocks the tax bill in the Budget Committee and is joined by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has raised separate concerns, the package could quickly die.
Bannon’s ‘season of war’ on GOP establishment may backfire with first battle
a growing number of Republicans say Bannon’s continued embrace of Moore .. could undercut his ambitions to play kingmaker in 2018.
.. “It introduces a different variable for the candidates he supports,” said Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart News, the ultraconservative website run by Bannon. “They’re going to be asked how they feel about being supported by someone who stood by a sexual predator. All of that baggage now follows Bannon politically.”
.. A political operative close to Bannon said Bannon continues to support Moore because he believes Moore’s denials about the most serious charges leveled by the women who have come forward.
.. “He’s got people banging down his door to talk with him,” said one Bannon associate
.. The Mercer family, a major financial patron of Breitbart and an array of other Bannon projects, does not appear to be fully on board.
.. Sheldon Adelson said through a spokesman that he would not be supporting Bannon’s efforts to remake the Senate and was instead “supporting Mitch McConnell 100 percent.”
.. Bannon praised him during a Zionist Organization of America dinner in New York, saying Trump’s victory “wouldn’t have come” without the help of Adelson, a major donor to the organization.
.. the real question is whether Bannon will be able to attract significant funding beyond the Mercers.
.. “I don’t know a single major donor who’s interested in funding this,” Holmes said, referring to Bannon’s efforts as a “vanity project.”
.. “It’s thrown all of Donald Trump’s agenda into flux, for a race in a state that should be a put-away for Republicans,” Holmes said. “Right now, it’s not about winning, it’s not about accomplishing the president’s agenda. It’s about Steve Bannon.”
.. After the initial Moore story broke, he said, Bannon associates were on cable TV talking about the age of consent in Alabama when party leaders should have been spending their time touting plans for tax reform.
.. After the initial Moore story broke, he said, Bannon associates were on cable TV talking about the age of consent in Alabama when party leaders should have been spending their time touting plans for tax reform.
.. Bannon has also claimed two other Republican “scalps” this year with the announced retirements of Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, two races he had said he was targeting.
.. One Bannon friend said he told him that he would be better off picking a few races where he could post early wins rather than announcing he was taking on the entire Republican establishment at once.
Jeff Flake’s Defiant Surrender
Republican politicians throughout the age of Trump, and again and again they have chosen to die in the dark.
This was true of Trump’s strongest primary-season rivals, who fought him directly and concertedly during exactly one of the umpteen debates and then, finding open war hard going, chose to lose and bow out as though Trump were a normal rival rather than the fundamentally unfit figure they had described just a few short weeks before.
It was true of the party functionaries, the hapless Reince Priebus above all, who denied the residual Republican forces resisting Trump the chance to fight him one last time in the light of the convention floor.
.. It was true of Paul Ryan; it was true even of John McCain.
.. It was not true of everyone. Mitt Romney and John Kasich declined to fall on the sword of party unity; so did George W. Bush and his father; so did some governors and a few junior senators, Mike Lee and Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake... while they refused to make the quietus, to strangle their own convictions in Trump’s ample shadow, they declined many chances to keep up the fight openly as well... The nomination of a figure like Trump, a clear threat to both the professed beliefs of his party’s leaders and to basic competence in presidential government, is the sort of shattering event that in the past would have prompted a real schism or independent candidacy... But Romney couldn’t talk Kasich into being that independent candidate, all the other possibilities demurred.. Now, almost a year into the Trump presidency, a similar dynamic is playing out. There is a small but significant Republican opposition to Trump, but its leading figures still don’t want to go to war with him directly, preferring philosophical attacks and tactical withdrawal to confrontation and probable defeat... To the extent that there’s a plausible theory behind all of these halfhearted efforts, it’s that resisting Trump too vigorously only strengthens his hold on the party’s base, by vindicating his claim to have all the establishment arrayed against him... In the end, if you want Republican voters to reject Trumpism, you need to give them clear electoral opportunities to do so — even if you expect defeat.. an anti-Trump movement that gives high-minded speeches but never mounts candidates confirms Trump’s claim to face establishment opposition while also confirming his judgment of the establishment’s guts and stamina — proving that they’re all low-energy, all “liddle” men, all unwilling to fight him man to man... If Corker really means what he keeps saying about the danger posed by Trump’s effective incapacity, he should call openly for impeachment or for 25th Amendment proceedings.. If Flake really means what he said in his impassioned speech, and he doesn’t want to waste time and energy on a foredoomed Senate primary campaign, then he should choose a different hopeless-seeming cause and primary Trump in 2020. George W. Bush should endorse him. So should McCain, and Corker, and Romney, and Kasich, and Sasse, and the rest of the anti-Trump list... They should expect to lose, and badly, but they should make Trump actually defeat them, instead of just clearing the field for his second nomination... And not only for the sake of their honor. The president’s G.O.P. critics should engage in electoral battle because the act of campaigning, the work of actually trying to persuade voters, is the only way anti-Trump Republicans will come to grips with the legitimate reasons that their ideas had become so unpopular that voters opted for demagoguery instead... A speechifying anti-Trumpism, distant from the fray, will always be self-regarding and self-deceiving — unwilling to see how the Iraq War discredited both the Bushist and McCainian styles of right-wing internationalism, incapable of addressing the economic disappointments that turned voters against Flake’s Goldwaterite libertarianism and Romney’s “trust me, I’m a businessman” promises... Only in actual political competition can the Republican elite reckon with why it lost its party, and how it might win again.. I think the G.O.P. is more likely to be renewed by someone who currently supports Trump or someone not yet active in politics than it is by the men resisting the president today.
Another Republican Call to Arms, but Who Will Answer?
In a stunning one-two assault, Mr. Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Mr. Flake took on the president in terms rarely, if ever, heard from members of a sitting president’s party.
Mr. Corker, who has been feuding with the man he once contemplated serving as vice president, accused Mr. Trump of serial lying and debasing the office.
“We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals, we must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country,” Mr. Flake said.
.. But Mr. Corker, Mr. Flake and Mr. McCain remain the outliers.
.. Mr. McConnell left his lunch with Mr. Trump and members of the caucus to emphasize the issues that bind congressional Republicans to Mr. Trump and play down the divisions underscored by Mr. Flake and Mr. Corker.
.. They have been willing to look past some actions and pronouncements by Mr. Trump that they consider beneath a president in hopes of pushing into law some of their long-sought goals, the most important of which are tax cuts. And with no substantial legislative achievements so far, the party is all in on a tax overhaul, recognizing that failure to deliver one will be a political disaster. That necessity ties them tightly to Mr. Trump, at least for now.