The turkey’s off the hook; middle class, not so much

Donald Trump is back from Asia. What do you think he’ll be doing next?

A) Pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey.

B) Urging Congress to pass a clean, simple, middle-class-friendly tax bill.

C) Pardoning Sean Hannity.

The answer is A, obviously. Turkey gets a reprieve on Tuesday.

But about the tax bill — things are getting a whole lot grislier than they are on the turkey front. Republicans desperately need to pass some kind of tax cuts, just to prove they’re capable of doing something more exciting than renaming post offices. Voting starts this week, but now they’ve really muddied up the game.

Republican leaders thought carefully and decided the best strategy was to attack Obamacare. Which worked so well for them last time around.

“How about ending the unfair & highly unpopular Indiv Mandate in OCare & reducing taxes even further?” Trump tweeted from Asia. The individual mandate requires everyone to have insurance. Without it, the whole system could fall apart.

The only Republican senator who was really lobbying for a tax-bill assault on Obamacare seemed to be Rand Paul of Kentucky.

But here’s the question. Why is the Senate choosing to totally complicate its tax-cut pitch, poisoning any possibility of bringing along moderate Democrats, by tossing in an allout assault on the Affordable Care Act?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a gathering of CEOs that cutting the individual mandate out of Obamacare would save the government $330 billion over 10 years.

That $330 billion, McConnell said, would allow them “to make permanent the corporate tax rate” and “puff up some of the middle-class tax relief that we would like to puff up.” The puffing would not be permanent, by the way. One of the grandest things about the new Senate version of the tax cuts is that stuff for multinational corporations is meant to last forever, while stuff for the middle class would fade away after a decade.

All these changes happened so swiftly and silently, almost nobody could immediately figure out what was going on. “We learned about this latest version at 10:30 last night,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said Wednesday. Wyden is the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He asked for a summary of what the new, thick, deeply complicated bill would do. “They all looked at us and said, ‘Why?’”

Everything’s so frenetic it’s hard to know what’s going on. The House Republicans, in a moment of large-heartedness, seem to have given up on killing a tax deduction for adoptions. Graduate students in work-study programs, however, had better keep their eyes open.

And the chances that the package will keep the deficit from exploding are pretty minimal. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut, one of the Democrats on the House tax-writing committee, says a Republican leader told him they would work everything out in the long run by cutting back on entitlements like Medicare.

Really, Trump’s staff probably went through a more careful process picking out a turkey for him to pardon. And we’re looking forward to that. Will he say anything to the turkey? It’s not as if he’s much of a fan of non-red meats.

Now steak is another matter. Do not ever expect Donald Trump to pardon a steer. Or lead a party.