Senate leaders work on tax bill holdouts

WASHINGTON — Senate Republican leaders wrangled with the last few GOP holdouts Thursday as they pushed toward passing the first major rewrite of the nation’s tax code in more than three decades.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he expected a final vote late Thursday or early Friday on a $1.4 trillion package that would slash the corporate tax rate, offer more modest cuts for families and individuals and eliminate several popular deductions.

Lawmakers would then try to reconcile the Senate package with one passed by the House in the hope of delivering a major legislative accomplishment to President Donald Trump by Christmas. Republicans have cast passage of a tax overhaul as a political imperative to ensure they hold their House and Senate majorities in next year’s midterm elections.

“We’re heading down the homestretch,” McConnell told reporters Thursday.

In a dramatic roll call that lasted an hour, the package cleared a procedural hurdle that threatened to derail the GOP’s entire tax drive.

Democrats forced on a vote on whether to return the measure to the Senate Finance Committee so it could be rewritten to not make federal deficits larger. After holding out until the last moment, Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Jeff Flake of Arizona eventually joined fellow Republicans to scuttle the Democratic proposal.

Had it succeeded, it would have derailed the bill.

The dispute was over a ruling by the Senate parliamentarian that a key provision of the bill designed to guard against big deficits would violate Senate rules about what could be in the tax bill. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has been pushing to add automatic tax increases in future years if the package doesn’t raise as much revenue as projected.

With the provision dead, Corker said senators would change the bill to roll back some of the tax cuts in future years, regardless of whether tax revenues meet expectations.

The package would add $1 trillion to the budget deficit over the next decade, much less than previously projected, according to a congressional analysis released Thursday.

The tax bill would increase economic growth, generating an additional $458 billion in tax revenue, according to the analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. The committee previously estimated that the package would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit.

The additional revenue is a boost to the bill but is still far short of the $2 trillion promised by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, announced their support for the tax package Thursday, giving it a major boost. Both McCain and Murkowski had voted against the GOP bill to dismantle the Obama health care law this past summer in a blow to the GOP.

Their support is key because Senate Republicans hold a slim 52-48 majority in the Senate, meaning they can only afford to lose two votes, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaker.