The News
House Democrats’ top tax writer has a plan for pushing back on the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” — and it mostly involves calling out Republicans’ inconsistency.
“They’re wobbly on this stuff,” House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Richard Neal, D-Mass., told Semafor at his Washington office Monday. “They’re very uncertain of where they’re headed. And they know the political consequences, because I talked to a couple of them already.”
House Republicans are hoping to get the tax portion of the bill out of committee on Tuesday. Neal plans to make that task as hard as he can by leading panel Democrats in calling out the bill’s omission of proposals like higher tax rates for upper-income Americans and venture capitalists — both ideas that President Donald Trump has said he’d support — and its impact on the federal deficit.
The central messaging goal for Democrats: convincing voters that the tax bill aids the wealthy, not the middle class.
“We could reach a deal with them on probably 98% of all this,” Neal said. “We just object to the idea that the rich aren’t paying more.”
The View From Richard Neal
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eleanor Mueller: What’s the best way for Democrats to push back on Republicans’ tax plans from the minority?
Richard Neal: They’re on the back foot right now. Clearly, the numbers don’t add up. And they’re avoiding any specificity, because they know what the reaction is going to be from the American people to cutting Medicaid.
It’s part of a longer saga here, and that is the pathology now of tax with the Republican Party. I’ve heard every variation, as you might expect: There are arguments that tax cuts pay for themselves. No, they don’t. Then I remember the Republican whip, during the Iraq War, saying that it was patriotic to cut taxes in a time of war. I mean, thank God Lincoln didn’t subscribe to that.
And then the latest: it’s going to give us extraordinary economic growth. Well, where’s the truthfulness of that? So I’ve heard all their arguments flat and round — and it still strikes me that they’re pretty unsure of where they’re heading.
They complain about the debt on Monday — and then they add $4 trillion to it on Tuesday. I’m astounded how they’ve rejected general Republican orthodoxy about balanced budgets and all of those things, and embraced this populist fervor that just doesn’t square with mathematics.
Do you think Americans believe that this bill benefits the wealthy, given how much Republicans are messaging around benefitting working people?
Yeah. I mean, they’re also figuring out what they’re paying right now. Again, I noticed just in buying some cereal over the weekend — pretty good jack-up in price.
The other part of it is, I understand where the [no taxes on tips] argument might be, but do you really want to move down the road with encouraging employers to eventually just to pay people the tips?
The danger there is, that will discourage employers from giving pay raises. And on the Social Security side, I also think that if it’s not paid for, then you are harming the Social Security Trust.
Did you ever think that you and Chip Roy would be on the same side of things?
I’m generally more consistent. He’s on the same side until the two-minute warning of the big game. It’s part of a pattern now that I’ve seen since the advent of televising floor proceedings and all of that: If you can rail at the microphone, maybe people will forget how you really voted.
Do you think Republicans fail to advance the bill?
They all say they’re against it, and then they all fold. I always say, it’s in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, and Trump gets on the phone, and the arithmetic doesn’t have to work — he just says, ‘Do it.’ And they jump in line.
So I don’t get excited when I hear them say, ‘We’re not going to do this.’
How can Democrats run on this next year?
It ought to be an easy opportunity to message. Just what’s happened in the last couple of weeks with this, trying to explain it — they’re not putting it out. They’re putting it out in parts. And perhaps one of the biggest issues that confronts the Republican Party is the issue of [the state and local tax deduction] — and they’re neither here nor there on that.
When people see the distribution tables of who gets what — that drives people to the polls.
They are at it with each other, let alone everyone else, over health care. There’s a downside to withdrawing a benefit that’s perceived as an expansion of an opportunity.
What’s missing from the tax conversation at this point?
Bipartisanship. We could reach a deal with them on probably 98 percent of all this. We just object to the idea that the rich aren’t paying more. They’re at 37 [% in taxes for the highest-earning Americans]; jack that back to 39.6, we could have a smaller deal.
Are there any backup plans being made behind the scenes if this falls apart?
No. I think the Senate is going to crush what they want to do. You can’t even tell them to show up for press conferences.