The Senate Republican tax bill got a major boost Friday morning ahead of planned votes as holdouts Ron Johnson and Steve Daines said they would vote “yes.”
Their support would appear to bring the GOP to the 50 votes needed to pass the major tax overhaul.
Johnson and Daines said Friday morning that they had received a deal from leadership to add about $100 billion in tax cuts for small businesses, a priority for them that had previously led them to oppose the bill.
“I’m planning to vote ‘yes’ today on the tax bill,” Daines, from Montana, said on Fox News. “This is a historic moment for our nation.”
“It looks like we have 50 votes,” Johnson in an interview with Milwaukee radio host Jay Weber.
Republicans were regrouping Friday morning on the tax bill to try to rework the details to gain the support of Tennessee’s Bob Corker and others, who said they wanted the tax cut to add less to deficits.
No deal had been announced yet to change the bill to appease Corker, Arizona’s Jeff Flake, and others who are worried about the debt.
Others in the conference have yet to say whether they will support the bill, including Susan Collins of Maine, who has sought to add a deduction for state and local property taxes to the bill. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah also have called for expanding the increased child tax credit to low-income families.
Daines and Johnson are now on board due to an increase in the deduction for non-corporate businesses, such as partnerships, sole proprietorships, and S-Corporations.
Such “pass-throughs,” which called that because they pass their earnings straight through to owners’ individual returns rather than facing a corporate entity-level tax, got a 17.4 percent deduction under the original bill. Effectively, that deduction brought their tax rate down to around 32 percent.
Johnson had said that rate would put smaller businesses at a disadvantage to big C-Corporations, which would get a 20 percent rate in the bill.
The new deal would increase the deduction from 17.4 percent to 23 percent, effectively bringing the top tax rate down below 30 percent.
It was not immediately clear how that bigger break would be paid for.
