Ryan: Election losses pressure GOP for tax plan
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan said the Republican losses in Tuesday night’s elections “just puts more pressure on making sure we follow through” on the party’s drive to overhaul the tax code.
Ryan’s comments Wednesday came as the House Ways and Means Committee entered its third day of debate on the nearly $6 trillion legislation, with the GOP-led panel wading through dozens of amendments and rejecting Democrats’ efforts to revise the bill. Republicans are determined to produce tax cuts and send a measure to President Donald Trump by Christmas to protect their congressional majorities in next year’s elections.
The committee voted along party lines against a battery of Democratic proposals to restore to the bill tax benefits to student borrowers, people with significant medical expenses, homeowners and teachers.
The proposed elimination of the deduction for medical expenses not covered by insurance is especially controversial. The deduction has helped offset costs of such things as nursing home care, laser eye surgery and out-of-state travel for a second opinion on a rare cancer.
Eliminating it “is a direct assault,” said Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., the failed amendment’s sponsor. “This is devastating to individual families.”
Ryan, speaking at an event held by the Washington Examiner newspaper, said, “We’ve got to get on with keeping our promise, and one of the chief promises we made when we ran for office ... in 2016 was that we would do tax reform and tax cuts for families, for people, and so we’ve got to get on with that.”
Ryan spoke hours after Republicans lost gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey by large margins .
The tax rewrite effort has assumed even greater significance in the wake of the GOP failure to repeal the Obama health care law.
“If anything, this just puts more pressure on making sure we follow through,” Ryan said. “That’s what I take out of it.”
What’s in the bill
As the House panel pushed to finish the tax legislation by Thursday, the Senate’s tax bill started to take shape.
That version is expected to completely repeal the federal deduction for state and local taxes, a flashpoint of contention for Republican lawmakers from high-tax states like New York and New Jersey, as well as for Democrats. Concessions were made in the House bill with a partial repeal.
The Senate measure also would retain the medical expense deduction, which the House plan eliminates. And the Senate would keep today’s seven personal income tax brackets, not collapse them into four like the House bill.
Republicans hope to garner Democratic support for their politically necessary legislation, which would bring the first major revamp of the U.S. tax code in 30 years. Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn met with Senate Democrats on Tuesday as Trump phoned in from his Asia trip.
Democrats weren’t buying Trump’s argument that the emerging GOP tax bill would hurt wealthy people, as he was said to have claimed during the call.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday his Democratic colleagues were “sort of shocked at what President Trump said and how far away from reality it was. He said there are no tax breaks for wealthy people in this bill, that’s why he had to put (repeal) of the estate tax in.”
The GOP plan calls for repealing the inheritance tax on multimilliondollar estates, a benefit for the wealthy.
As the committee debated the amendments, Democrats accused the Republicans of eliminating the benefits to pay for billions in tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations.