Republicans plan to roll out the final joint Senate-House tax plan Friday and pass it next week, but first they need to win over a few holdout senators.
Florida’s Marco Rubio said Thursday that he will oppose the bill unless it extends the doubled child tax credit to lower-income families. A spokesman for Mike Lee said the Utah senator was also undecided, and working toward expanding the child tax credit.
With only 52 Republicans in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can lose only two Republicans and still pass the tax overhaul.
He already lost one in moving the bill through the Senate: Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee.
Other potential swing senators had yet to weigh in definitively. Maine’s Susan Collins, a centrist who has voted against major GOP legislation in the past, has said that she will wait until seeing the joint Senate-House conference report before arriving at a final decision.
Even with a Senate majority not totally locked in, conferees planned to release the report on Friday. Senate GOP Whip John Cornyn said he expected to pass the final bill Tuesday.
One way for Republicans to get to 50-plus votes would be to flip Rubio to a “yes” while gaining Lee’s support.
Rubio laid out his terms in tweets Thursday afternoon. He suggested that the tax negotiators would have to add several hundred dollars’ worth of refundability to the child tax credit, meaning that more families who don’t pay income taxes could get a break on payroll taxes through the credit.
Adding at least a few hundred $’s in refundable cuts for working families who seem to always be forgotten isn’t hard to do either 2/2
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 14, 2017
That change would boost the tax savings for many families but cost the Treasury a significant amount. Tax writers would have to make concessions elsewhere in the bill to keep the total size of the tax cut below $1.5 trillion, as mandated by budget rules the GOP put in place for the bill.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said Thursday evening that such a change is “under discussion.”
“I’m optimistic that both Mike Lee and Sen. Rubio will be supporting this package at the end,” he said on MSNBC.
Republicans didn’t say how the bigger credit might be paid for, though. One way would be to settle for a higher corporate tax rate than the 21 percent expected in the deal. A rate of 22 percent would pay for the changes. Another option would be to phase out the individual tax cuts earlier than called for in the Senate bill. A third would be to lower the income threshold at which families could no longer claim the credit, set at $500,000 in the Senate bill.
While the Senate was less certain, Republicans’ confidence that the bill would pass the House, at least, appeared justified.
“Full steam ahead,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Conservative support for the tax rate-slashing bill was likely always assured. The bigger risk was that the measure could lose support from more centrist members in high-tax, blue states, who were promised that the conference bill would protect their constituents from the effects of limiting the state and local tax deduction.
They got their wish. The final bill would boost the remaining state and local tax breaks by allowing taxpayers to deduct up to $10,000 of property and income or sales tax. The top individual income tax rate would be lowered from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, shielding more high earners from potential tax increases.
Those changes likely will not be enough to win over the representatives who voted against the bill the first time it cleared the House. Rep. Leonard Lance of New Jersey, for instance, said Thursday that he was still a “no,” because he favors keeping the state and local deduction in its entirety.
But House Speaker Paul Ryan likely will keep the support of the vulnerable members who did vote for the bill, putting it over the top. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., for instance, told local media he expected to vote for the bill.
