When talking taxes, party lines tend to blur
After shutting out Dems, GOP seeking a common ground
WASHINGTON — For seven months, Republicans haven’t allowed Democrats to have any say in the big stuff Congress has been considering, notably the GOP bid to overhaul the nation’s health care system.
But now it’s time for lawmakers to consider the legislation that could affect virtually everyone’s lives — an overhaul of the nation’s tax code — and Republicans are talking to Democrats.
Rewriting the tax code has traditionally involved members of both parties. The last overhaul in 1986 was signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan, as Republicans and Democrats surrounded him.
Tax legislation is different because special interests tend to cross party lines. Oil state lawmakers, regardless of party, want breaks for that industry. Hightax states want deductions for state and local taxes. And so on.
“It’s complicated and important to every single American in a way that even the health care bill was not,” said former Rep. Barbara Kennelly, a Democrat who as a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee worked with Republicans to write the 1986 legislation.
“I have no idea how you would do it in a strictly partisan way,” she said. “This is everybody’s opportunity to say, ‘Let’s be grownups.’ Otherwise, it will be like health care and they won’t get it done.”
The chairman of the Senate’s chief tax-writing panel is eager for that tradition to continue.
“In my book it has to be bipartisan,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who has worked closely with the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.
Wyden returned the love. “Taxes have historically been an opportunity for finding common ground,” he said. “Democrats believe that special interests have hijacked the tax code. Republicans believe the system is broken, that there’s no certainty and predictability and I think that’s a valid point as well.”
Possible hurdles
There’s even a recent model for cooperation, Wyden said, citing a tax deal that he, Hatch and House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, forged in 2015.
“We’ve written important bills together,” Wyden said. “The question is: Will the leadership, including the White House, see that unless you find some common ground here you’re going down the same route you did on health care?”
There is a hurdle or two that could tear the two sides apart. It’s unclear how much of a legislative victory the party would want to give to President Donald Trump on his next major initiative.
Wyden said that Republican ideas he’s heard are little more than seeking “crumbs for the middle class and big tasty cakes for the fortunate few.”
Democrats’ demands
Democrats are staking out their position. Forty-three Democrats and the two independents that caucus with them wrote a letter this week to Trump and Senate Republican leadership, saying they wanted to work together but could not stomach tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent, nor legislation that increases the debt or deficit.
That gave Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., an opening. He accused Democrats of being uninterested in “most of the principles that would get the country growing again.”
He told reporters, “I don’t think this is going to be 1986, when you had a bipartisan effort to scrub the code.” McConnell said he’d try to use a procedural maneuver to allow debate on the overhaul to be cut off with 51 votes instead of the traditional 60.
Yet at the same time, Republicans said they would hold hearings on tax proposals. And several Democrats besides Wyden have signaled they’re open to talking.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a veteran Senate Finance Committee member, said he’s heard a number of Democrats on the committee are interested in working in a bipartisan manner.
“What it’s going to amount to is for (Senate Minority Leader Chuck) Schumer not to tell his people like (Democratic leaders) did on health care, ‘Don’t work with the Republicans’ because that just poisons the well,’” Grassley said.