Selling $1.5T tax cut is a taxing task
members to focus on the law range from the serious — such as weekly talking points pointing out the top five ways workers and families would benefit from the law — to the symbolic.
House leaders each week award a jar of Jelly Belly candy to the member of their caucus deemed to have worked the hardest to promote the law. Winners have included Reps. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., for a local tax reform event at a Home Depot, and Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., for a statewide tax tour.
By August, one lawmaker will win a “Ronald Reagan Award” for completing a checklist of assignments aimed at pushing the law, including holding 12 town hall meetings, making seven radio or TV appearances, and delivering three House floor speeches.
Republicans are aware of the consequences if they are unable to sell the law. Many look to Democrats in 2010, who were wiped out in that year’s midterms after they couldn’t sell the public on former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Hoping to save 2018 Republicans from similar losses, outside GOP groups are trying to step in where the president has not.
The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity is playing a lead role in the Koch networks’ $20 million campaign for the law. The group is running ads in battleground Senate race states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota condemning Democratic incumbents for opposing the law, and is sending activists to man phone banks and knock on doors in key states.
The tax law permanently cut corporate rates from 35 percent to 21 percent while reducing most income tax rates for individuals, although independent analyses have found that wealthy Americans reap a larger share of the individual tax cuts.
It made a host of other changes, including increasing the child tax credit, repealing the Affordable Care Act requirement for most Americans to carry health insurance and rearranging the deductions used to get money back on tax returns.
The pressure on Republicans to drive a positive message on the law was underscored by a blowup this month over comments by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., suggesting that there was “no evidence whatsoever” that corporations that had reaped a windfall were distributing those profits to their workers.
Democrats pounced on Rubio’s comments, which echoed their own complaints about the law, and conservative groups denounced Rubio angrily. He returned to the remarks in a subsequent opinion piece, repeating his core claim about the corporate tax cuts but couching it in effusive praise of the GOP tax law as a whole.
“He can take it back 300 times and it doesn’t matter,” Norquist said.
Democrats have missed few opportunities to criticize the law as a giveaway to corporate America that granted scant benefits to workers and the middle class. Republicans themselves have fretted that some voters don’t seem to have noticed that their paychecks have gone up.
And because this year’s tax filing season was under the old code, voters weren’t confronted with the law’s benefits, even though Republicans endeavored to assure them at news conferences and TV appearances that next year things will be better.