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Kevin McCarthy continues to prove he's the worst speaker in history [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2023-08-01
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy desperately needs to prove that he can lead, that he can do big policy stuff with his majority. He needs some achievement to take to voters nationally that doesn’t revolve around investigating Hunter Biden’s dick pics. Leadership thought they had it in a tax package, including tax cuts for wealthy corporations and maybe even some help for regular people. Tax cuts should be a bulletproof strategy for uniting his team, because they are Republicans.
But it’s not working, and this time the extremists aren’t to blame. It’s those supposed moderates, largely the 18 first-termers who are in districts that went for Joe Biden in 2020. But it’s not because they want to preserve the progressive, climate change-fighting tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s not because they think corporations really should be chipping into the national treasury. It’s because they want cuts for wealthy homeowners in their districts.
The 2017 GOP Tax Scam, passed with only Republican votes and signed by Donald Trump, cut the federal deduction for state and local taxes to $10,000, dubbed the SALT cap. That was clearly a punishment for people in blue states, where state and local property taxes are higher. But now Republicans are representing some of those blue state districts, and they want that cap removed. For the same reasons they put the cap in that 2017 law, Republican leadership doesn’t want to scrap it now.
RELATED STORY: ‘Centrist’ House GOPers find their line in the sand: Tax cuts for wealthy homeowners
The Ways & Means Committee actually completed work on a three-part tax package a month and a half ago, and since then it’s stalled. Punchbowl checked in with committee members and leadership on the package’s progress and were told there’s no clear path for the bill right now because of the moderate blockade. Again, McCarthy has just five votes to spare on any bill and won’t work with Democrats to find them, so their big tax cut plans are stymied.
Committee Chair Jason Smith told Punchbowl that the rest of the team is on board, and he has the votes of everybody else. “I’ve told those guys I’m open to working with them moving forward on this, but we can’t put everyone’s district-specific tax issue in this first bill, especially ones which lose us votes.”
Rep. Richie Neal of Massachusetts, who chaired the committee in the Democratic majority, has offered to talk to Republicans, he said, because there are a few ideas in there they could work with, like increasing the standard deduction for everyone for two years while phasing it out for higher earners after 2025. They’d talked about resuming the child tax credit payments that helped so many families during the pandemic. That’s stuff Democrats could help with, Neal said. When he was chair, he regularly talked with Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, who was the top Republican on the committee at the time. Smith, he said, rarely reaches out, so Neal can be forgiven for gloating, just a little bit, over Smith’s and McCarthy’s failure with their own team.
“The problem they have is pretty obvious, and that is they can’t sell it to their own members. I never had that problem,” Neal told Punchbowl. “I can’t see us embracing anything that would come close to huge tax cuts again, that’s for sure.”
So the one thing that Republicans could long be counted on to accomplish—tax cuts for the rich—is out of their reach because the cuts wouldn’t go to the right rich people. Those supposed moderates are blocking it, but not because they want more help for more people, and not because they want to use the real leverage they have in this closely divided Congress for good.
They aren’t bucking leadership on the stuff that is so damaging and polarizing: the abortion bans, the LGBTQ persecution, the book bans. They helped pass all those poison culture war pills in the defense authorization, massively complicating getting that bill done with the Senate. Their refusal to fight the extremists on those issues show that they won’t fight when it comes to funding the government. That makes them just as liable for blame as the Freedom Caucus when the government shuts down this fall.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/1/2184543/-How-chaotic-is-the-House-GOP-They-can-t-even-agree-on-tax-cuts
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