No Democrats Expected to Vote for Tax Cuts — Why?

As the Senate begins debate on the historic tax reform bill, some Republicans hold out a modicum of hope that they might get a bit of help from the Democrats.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday that former President Barack Obama and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) previously supported many of the elements in the current Tax Cuts and Jobs Act bill.

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“I think that, you know, there’s still some Democrats out there on taxes that we might have an opportunity to get to vote positively for this bill,” he said. “But to me, working together to solve the challenges facing this country is the number-one thing that we should be doing in the Senate.”

The reality is, however, that the bill — if it passes — most likely will do so without a single Democratic vote in either chamber.

Such hyperpartisanship was not always the case.

Time was when tax cuts enjoyed broad bipartisan support. When the House of Representatives debated President Ronald Reagan’s proposed tax cut in 1981, 48 Democrats broke ranks and joined 190 Republicans on their alternative to a plan offered by the majority Democrats. Afterward, the bill sailed through the chamber on a 323-107 vote.

The Senate, meanwhile, passed the measure 89-11. That included 37 of the upper chamber’s 47 Democrats.

Related: An Exceptional America: We’re Divided Yet United

Five years later, when Reagan negotiated with then-Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) on the last major overhaul of the tax code, the Senate passed its bill 97-3. The final bill that emerged from a House-Senate conference committee attracted 176 of 250 Democratic votes in the House and 33 of 45 Democrats in the Senate.

Even the 2001 tax cuts under George W. Bush, which were more controversial, got some Democratic buy-in. The final bill got 13 “yea” votes from House Democrats and a dozen Senate Democrats.

Reagan Had ‘Great Sway’ Over Nation
Presidential historian Craig Shirley, who has written several biographies on Reagan, said the disconnect is partly due to fundamental changes in the political parties and partly due to the differences in how Americans viewed the Gipper then and President Donald Trump now. While Trump’s approval rating is in the high 30s or low 40s, Shirley said, Reagan’s stood at about 65 or 75 percent.

“He had great sway over the entire country, not just over the Republican Party, which he had remade in his own image,” he said.

Indeed, The New York Times in 1981 quoted then-House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.) as saying that a televised address by Reagan had ignited “a telephone blitz like this nation has never seen.”

“You do what’s right and hope one day the Ds come back.”

Dan Rostenkowski, a Chicago Democrat who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee, told Reagan by phone after watching his own tax plan go down to defeat, “Well, Mr. President, you’re tough. You beat us.”

But Shirley said it was more than Reagan’s charisma that brought so much support from Democrats. He said there still were many conservative “boll weevil” Democrats in Congress in the 1980s.

“The Democratic Party was much different in 1981 and 1986,” he said. “The party has moved substantially to the Left, significantly to the Left.”

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, agreed. He compared political polarization over the past three decades to two trains moving away from each other. The Republican train has moved slowly one direction, he said, while the Democratic train has moved faster in the opposite direction.

Democrats and much of the media do not have the perspective of watching the trains from a neutral spot but are traveling on the Democratic train, Norquist said.

“All you see is the Republican train moving away,” he said. “You don’t realize what’s happening is that you’ve moved away.”

Dems Complain They Were Shut Out
Democrats reject the contention that they would oppose any tax cut. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said during a Senate Budget Committee meeting this week that the Senate Finance Committee held 33 days of hearings in 1986 when lawmakers were crafting the tax reform bill.

“On this bill, the Senate Finance Committee has not held a single hearing to consider the merits of these policies,” she said. “This bill is being rushed through with no attempt at bipartisanship.”

Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union, said it is possible a different approach might have drawn some Democratic support. He noted that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and then-Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) offered a bipartisan proposal in 2013 and 2014 to overhaul the corporate tax code.

In addition, moderate Democrats such as Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) have been open to tax cuts, Sepp said. He said other Democrats have expressed a willingness to work with Republicans on expanding the child tax credit, he added.

“That’s reasonably recent history to suggest that there might have been some bipartisanship,” he said.

Still, Sepp said, both parties have fewer dissenters than they did a generation ago.

“You had Dixiecrats and you had ‘gypsy moth Republicans,'” he said.

Shirley, the historian, said Trump also lacks the deep political ties that Reagan had from decades in politics campaigning for members of Congress.

Trump: Tax Cuts Will Be ‘Rocket Fuel’ for Economy

“He had a lot of IOUs built up that Trump doesn’t have,” he said.

Norquist, the tax-cut advocate, said it would be foolish for Republicans to water down their bill to chase the chimera of bipartisanship.

“You do what’s right and hope one day the Ds come back,” he said.

(photo credit, homepage image: Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; photo credit, article image: Donald Trump, cut out, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)