In key victory, Senate advances GOP tax plan

WASHINGTON — After days of debate and closed-door meetings, Senate Republicans advanced a $1.5 trillion tax overhaul package — a victory for congressional leadership and the White House who hope to see the bill become law by the end of the year.

The bill passed early Saturday morning on a near party line vote of 51-49.

The federal tax legislation is opposed by top Vermont officials across party lines. Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., both voted against it. Republican Gov. Phil Scott has voiced his opposition. Sanders said the bill will be “extraordinarily disastrous.”

Only one Republican — Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee — broke with his party to vote against the tax overhaul bill, saying he wasn’t able to overcome concerns about the fiscal impacts of the legislation.

Republican leadership say their reforms to the tax code will stimulate economic growth, create jobs and benefit Americans across economic strata.

But opponents, which included all Democrats and Independents in the Senate, charge that the bill is slanted to favor the wealthy, will reduce the number of people covered by health insurance, and will harm the fiscal health of the country.

The core provisions of the Senate legislation would permanently lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. The bill also lowers individual income tax rates through 2025.

The package pays for the cuts in part by repealing a key provision of the Affordable Care Act known as the “individual mandate,” which mandates that people obtain health insurance or pay a small penalty.

As debate continued into the evening Friday, Sanders said on the floor that the bill “will go down in history as one of the worst, most unfair pieces of legislation ever passed.”

“While the Republicans may get away with this act of looting tonight, history is not on their side,” Sanders said. “The day will come and it will come sooner than later when we are going to have a government here that represents all of us, not just the Koch brothers, not just the billionaire class, not just wealth campaign contributors.”

Top Senate Republicans, meanwhile, hailed the step as “historic.”

“Senate Republicans today came together to make history and advance a comprehensive tax overhaul that will deliver more income, more jobs, higher wages and more opportunity for all Americans,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in a statement early Saturday morning.

The legislation will likely now go to a conference committee where lawmakers from both chambers will attempt to hammer out a compromise between the Senate version and the bill the House passed last month.

Vermont officials do not yet have a clear picture of what the Senate bill will mean for the state. Many involved with affordable housing, higher education and other sectors in Vermont have raised concerns about implications of proposals in the Senate or House packages.

As debate began on the bill on Wednesday, it was unclear that Senate leadership had sufficient support to move the bill forward as a handful of GOP members raised concerns about the impact on the national debt and provisions for small businesses.

Republicans and the White House have asserted that the package would spur robust economic growth and that it would pay for itself. However, an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation released Thursday found that the proposal will increase the nation’s debt by $1 trillion over the next decade. The national debt stands at roughly $20 trillion.

Horse-trading among Republicans in an effort to get at least 50 votes continued until just hours before the vote. Many in the minority complained that they had not had time to read the approximately 500-page bill, which was initially delivered to senators with changes marked in handwritten notes, according to an aide.

The uncertainty around the support from a few key GOP senators was highlighted in a moment of high drama on the floor Thursday evening when three Republicans held open a vote on whether to send the bill back to committee for an hour.

Eventually, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., postponed the showdown on the bill from Thursday night, when it was initially expected, to Friday.

The dam appeared to break Friday midday, after Senate Republicans huddled in a room in the Capitol for about an hour. Reporters milled outside, mobbing senators as they exited.

Following the closed-door meeting, key holdouts released statements suggesting they would back the bill.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he would vote for the bill after securing an agreement from leadership to work toward a permanent legislative solution for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Me., also signaled her intention to vote for the bill when she posted a message on Twitter that the legislation will include several provisions she supports — including allowing people who itemize to deduct up to $10,000 for state and local property taxes. The provision mirrors one in the House bill.

The Senate’s 46 Democrats and two Independents maintained staunch opposition to the tax bill throughout the debate.

Sanders took to the Senate floor several times during the debate to argue that Republicans would use the fiscal pressures created by the tax legislation to propel cuts to social programs.

An exchange with Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey escalated to shouting levels Thursday afternoon when Sanders pressed him on whether Republicans would subsequently put forward legislation to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.

“I have to disappoint the senator from Vermont by informing him that there is no secret plan to do any of the above,” Toomey said.

Sanders asked Toomey personally to verify he wouldn’t cut those programs. “Do I have that word from you?”

“I am not going to support any cuts to people who are on the program and need those benefits, but I want this program to survive,” Toomey replied.

Sanders cut him off.

“He just let the cat out of the box, or whatever the phrase is,” the junior Vermont senator said to laughter from the visitors’ gallery. “He just told you he’s going to cut Social Security. That’s it, my friends.”

Sanders offered an amendment to make it more challenging for lawmakers to cut major services. The amendment failed 54-46.

The tax bill could potentially trigger automatic cuts to spending programs, including Medicare, because of a 2010 law intended to curb the growth of the national debt.

McConnell charged that is a “misleading” claim by Democrats, and said there are “readily available methods” for Congress to waive the law and prevent programmatic cuts.

Democrats, including Vermont’s senior senator, have consistently charged that the Republican tax plan benefits the wealthiest in the country.

“This is a bill that cheats our future for the sake of a tax-cut windfall for the 1 percent,” Leahy said in a statement this week. “It does absolutely wonderful things for the wealthiest taxpayers, like the president, his cronies and his family. But it does not advance the common good.”

The Republican-led tax plan has been met with resistance from Vermont’s Republican governor, too.

At a press conference this, week, Scott said he was aware of some lawmakers who sought to slow the process down. He said he hoped “common sense will prevail.”

Scott does not support the move by Senate Republicans to include the repeal of the individual mandate for health care insurance in the tax bill. He said health care should be handled separately from the tax issue.

An aide for Scott confirmed Friday shortly before the vote that the governor “continues to be concerned with the bill in its current form,” and he believes Congress should take more time to work on it and consider impacts on the nation’s debt.

Scott said at his press conference that the administration was still gauging what the impact of the bill would be on Vermonters.

“We’re still trying to catch up on that,” he said. “You know, there’s going to be winners and losers. But we have to determine whether there’s more winners than losers in Vermont.”

As it became clear that Republicans had enough votes to pass the bill, Sanders was preparing to head out on a previously planned circuit of rallies in Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Because floor debate spilled over into Friday, Sanders will appear at the first event, in Louisville, by video.

“My job is to rally the American people to understand that this is an extraordinarily disastrous and unfair tax bill,” Sanders said, as he stepped into a Capitol elevator on his way to the floor to cast a vote on an amendment.