It's official: Republicans prioritize fat-cat tax cheaters over, well, everyone else
Senate Republicans have found yet another way to prove that Trump rules their world. How ironic is it that his empire is tottering in a tax fraud investigation in which Trump himself is implicated at precisely the same time Republicans refuse to give the IRS the funding it needs to go after tax cheats in order to help pay for rebuilding infrastructure?
Sen. Rob Portman, who has been “leading” the handful of Republicans alongside Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in the never-ending bipartisan negotiations, broke the news Sunday. This one bit of funding—making sure that everybody has to pay their goddamn taxes—that they had agreed upon is now out of what they have been calling a deal.
Now it’s back to the drawing board, so they can’t possibly have anything ready to move forward in the Senate this week, as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has asked. Never mind that they have been “working” on this for nearly seven weeks—they can’t possibly be ready to vote Wednesday on whether or not they’re ready to have a bill to vote on eventually.
Because that’s what they’ll vote on Wednesday—just a procedural vote, or cloture, for a placeholder bill that their plan would eventually be poured into. That’s unconscionable, says Portman, that he would demand they show the tiniest bit of their work. “Chuck Schumer, with all due respect, is not writing the bill, nor is Mitch McConnell,” Portman said. “So that’s why we shouldn’t have an arbitrary deadline of Wednesday. We should bring the legislation forward when it’s ready.” Which will be approximately never.
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Because while Portman had to make sure he got that part in there about how McConnell isn’t writing the bill, McConnell is absolutely in charge of the Republicans. And when McConnell says he has “total unity” from his team in obstructing Joe Biden’s presidency, he’s not bluffing.
As if to demonstrate, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney—the one guy who supposedly stands for something among the GOP—parroted the party line about Schumer being too hasty. “I think we’ll move quickly, but we’re not going to vote on something until we actually have a bill,” he told reporters at the end of last week.
Schumer has also set Wednesday as the deadline for agreement in the Democratic caucus on the budget blueprint that will form the basis of a larger $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that includes the major economic priorities of Biden’s plan. He’s been intent on making the two tracks of this process—the regular order bipartisan bill and the budget reconciliation, which can pass with a simple majority—proceed side-by-side.
“Everyone has been having productive conversations and it’s important to keep the two-track process moving,” Schumer said Thursday when he announced the Wednesday deadlines. “All parties involved in the bipartisan infrastructure bill talks must now finalize their agreement so the Senate can begin considering that legislation next week.”
On Friday, however, a right-wing and reliably anti-immigration federal judge in Texas threw a wrench into the works, adding more complexity to what the Democrats need to do by declaring the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program illegal. Which means that putting a path to citizenship for Dreamers and other immigrants into the reconciliation bill has become urgent and essential to make sure it’s done this year.
At least Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin seems to be okay with adding immigration into the mix. He still finds it “very, very disturbing” that the proposal deals with climate change, however.
But supporting a reconciliation bill that might hike taxes on the wealthy and invest in lessening our reliance on fossil fuels? “That’s a challenge,” Manchin said. It’s going to be a long, busy week.