Sen. Susan Collins doesn’t want to see the Obamacare individual mandate repealed. For Sens. Rand Paul and Tom Cotton, though, repealing the mandate is critical.
Several other Republicans say they’re worried about the size of the tax cuts and the deficit it will leave behind.
And Sen. Ron Johnson already has said he can’t vote for the bill as it stands now, saying the package tilts too much toward benefitting large corporations at the expense of small businesses.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have to sort out those, and a myriad of other objections, if he’s to shepherd the GOP’s tax-cut bill through.
Mr. Johnson says he’s spoken recently to President Trump, Speaker Paul D. Ryan, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as GOP leaders launch an all-out push to get a package to Mr. Trump’s desk by the end of the year.
“I didn’t do it to draw attention to myself. I wanted to draw attention to this issue, and I have,” Mr. Johnson said recently on WISN-TV.
Still, the Wisconsin Republican said he could support a bill — once changes are made — when the floor debate begins after Thanksgiving, and even seemed optimistic that they’ll get a final bill to Mr. Trump’s desk.
“I think just the political imperative. There is a level of desperation on the part of Republicans,” he said.
The Senate Finance Committee approved a draft on a party-line vote Thursday, just hours after the full House approved its own version on a surprisingly easy vote.
They’ll eventually have to meld the two bills together — but first the Senate must clear its own version.
Scott Greenberg, an analyst at the Tax Foundation, estimated that all told, about a fifth of the chamber’s 52 GOP senators have publicly expressed specific concerns or issues they have with the tax package.
“How do they navigate all these concerns?” he said.
Both the House and Senate plans slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and lower individual rates, while doing away with various exemptions like the state and local tax deduction.
They also provide new incentives for smaller “pass-through” companies that file as individuals. The Senate bill is more generous in the child tax credit — a move to pick up several Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
And the Senate bill repeals the individual mandate, while the House bill does not.
That’s a problem for Ms. Collins.
“I hope the Senate will follow the lead of the House and strike it,” she said this week on CNN, saying that resulting premium hikes from the repeal would cancel out the tax cuts many middle-class Americans would receive.
Ms. Collins, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. John McCain of Arizona doomed the Senate GOP’s Obamacare repeal effort over the summer. But Mr. McCain has praised the process for the tax reform debate, and Ms. Murkowski may be more supportive of the tax-cut bill because it’s being coupled with new authority to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which has long been an Alaska priority.
That could leave Ms. Collins standing alone, particularly given that so many other Republicans say an individual mandate repeal is critical.
“If you don’t repeal the individual mandate, then you really don’t have enough money I think to make this work,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Monday on Fox News Radio.
Republican leaders have billed the mandate repeal as a win-win: it would free up more than $300 billion to be used to lower taxes elsewhere, and follow through on the GOP’s campaign pledges to repeal or dismantle former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
Mr. Trump has lobbied hard for the mandate repeal to be included, but the White House has signaled in recent days it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker.
“If it becomes an impediment to getting the best tax bill we can, then we’re okay with taking it out,” White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told CNN.
But leaving it out could potentially increase the $1.5 trillion plan’s price tag and the bill’s effect on the national debt — an issue several other senators are worried about.
Mr. Flake, Arizona Republican, said Monday he thinks tax reform is “desperately” needed, but that he doesn’t want to support a package that will explode federal deficits.
“We’ve got to realize we have a $20 trillion debt and a deficit that’s about $600 billion a year, and we can’t do things that are simply going to explode that deficit,” Mr. Flake said on KFYI radio. “So I’m going to balance this reform package with that in mind.”
“These are tough packages,” Mr. Flake said. “You always gore somebody’s ox. Nobody comes out completely untouched.”
Mr. Flake’s concerns about the debt have been echoed by Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and James Lankford of Oklahoma, who are targets of a new six-figure TV ad campaign from a coalition of business groups also urging Mr. Johnson to “stand strong” in his opposition.
“Tell Sen. Bob Corker to keep his promise and vote no on increasing the deficit,” says one ad from the group Businesses for Responsible Tax Reform.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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