GOP secures Senate votes to pass tax bill
WASHINGTON — Republicans muscled the largest tax overhaul in 30 years through the Senate early Saturday, taking a big step toward giving President Donald Trump his first major legislative triumph after months of false starts and frustration on other fronts.
"Just what the country needs to get growing again," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in an interview after a final burst of negotiation closed in on a nearly $1.5 trillion package that impacts the breadth of American society.
He shrugged off polls finding scant public enthusiasm for the measure, saying the legislation would prove its worth. "Big bills are rarely popular," he said. "You remember how unpopular 'Obamacare' was when it passed?"
Trump on Saturday tweeted his thanks to Senate and House Republicans as they now begin trying to reconcile differences in legislation passed by both chambers, a behind-closed-doors process that is expected to move swiftly. Trump is aiming to sign the tax package into law before Christmas. "Biggest Tax Bill and Tax Cuts in history just passed in the Senate," he tweeted inaccurately. The overhaul is significant but far from the largest.
Presiding over the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence announced the 51-49 vote to applause from Republicans. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was the only lawmaker to cross party lines, joining the Democrats in opposition. The measure focuses its tax reductions on businesses and higher-earning individuals, gives more modest breaks to others and offers the boldest rewrite of the nation's tax system since 1986.
Republicans said the package would benefit people of all incomes and ignite the economy. Even an official projection of a $1 trillion, 10-year flood of deeper budget deficits couldn't dissuade GOP senators from rallying behind the bill.
"Obviously I'm kind of a dinosaur on the fiscal issues," said Corker, who battled to keep the bill from worsening the government's accumulated $20 trillion in IOUs.
The Republican-led House approved a similar bill last month in what has been a stunningly quick trip through Congress for complex legislation. Democrats derided the hastily written, scribbles-in-the-margin crafting of the bill in the final hours Friday night.
After spending the year's first nine months futilely trying to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, GOP leaders were determined to move the measure rapidly before opposition Democrats and lobbying groups could blow it up. The party views passage as crucial to retaining its House and Senate majorities in next year's elections.
Democrats dismissed the bill as a gift to its wealthy and business backers at the expense of lower-earning people. They played up the fact that the bill would permanently reduce corporate tax rates, from 35 percent to 20 percent, while offering only temporary tax cuts to individuals, lasting until 2026.
Congress' nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation has said the bill's reductions for many families would be modest and by 2027, families earning under $75,000 would on average face higher, not lower, taxes.
The bill is "removed from the reality of what the American people need," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. He criticized Republicans for releasing a revised, 479-page bill that no one could absorb shortly before the final vote, saying, "The Senate is descending to a new low of chicanery."
"You really don't read this kind of legislation," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told home-state reporters, saying senators focus on the major provisions as opposed to the "mind numbing" comparisons to current law.
Democrats took to the Senate floor and social media to mock one page that included changes scrawled in barely legible handwriting. Later, they won enough GOP support to kill a provision by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would have bestowed a tax break on conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.
The bill hit rough waters after the Joint Taxation panel concluded it would worsen federal shortfalls by $1 trillion over a decade, even when factoring in economic growth that lower taxes would stimulate. Trump administration officials and many Republicans have insisted the bill would pay for itself by stimulating the economy.