House moves ahead with tax code rewrite
Pushback mounts from Democrats, business groups
WASHINGTON — The House forged ahead with its tax code rewrite Tuesday as Republican leaders fended off attacks from Democrats, who assailed the tax plan as a gift to the rich, and from business groups that said the legislation would disadvantage multinational companies.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, said Republicans would focus on clarifying what is and is not in the bill as the House tries to push it to a floor vote next week.
“The challenge to the American public is what is the truth about this bill,” McCarthy said. “I think what’s most important is we should state the facts.”
The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation released a new analysis of the bill’s potential impacts Tuesday morning, which suggested tax cuts for lower- and middle-income taxpayers would fade over the course of a decade, more so than they would for high earners.
The House Ways and Means Committee opened a second day of debate on the bill, which will continue through this week. The committee chairman, Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said Tuesday morning that he expected the bill to pass out of committee Thursday and to move quickly to the House floor.
In an interview on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Brady said that the bill would not be subject to amendments on the House floor. But he also said that Republicans still were considering further changes to the bill, including possibly restoring tax breaks to encourage adoption and including a provision to repeal the health care law’s requirement that most people have health insurance.
“We’ll work to continue to improve it at every step,” Brady said, “including as we send it to the House floor.”
A prominent conservative group, the Club for Growth, criticized the House bill Tuesday for what it called “four serious shortcomings,” including maintaining the existing top tax rate on millionaires and phasing out the estate tax instead of repealing it.
With the process underway in the House, business groups and other lobbyists began turning much of their attention to the Senate, which is expected to introduce its own version of the bill Thursday.