MSNBC political analyst Elise Jordan complained Wednesday about how “unfortunate” it is that the Republican Party’s ability to craft its tax reform bill with a congressional majority resulted from “how you voted in an election.”
Yes, she really did say that. LifeZette replayed the video clip multiple times.
The House and the Senate reached a deal Wednesday in reconciling their separate bills — a move that brings President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deliver tax reform closer to fruition. But Jordan, a Time magazine columnist, took issue with the fact that presidential and congressional elections have consequences.
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“And I think it’s unfortunate that we are designing — that we are designing public policy in a way that, you know, comes down to how you voted in an election,” Jordan said.
Jordan was responding to MSNBC host Katy Tur’s question about the forthcoming tax reform bill’s components. Tur highlighted the corporate tax rate reduction from 35 percent to 21 percent and the high-income individual tax rate cut from 39.6 percent to 37 percent.
Tur also noted that the mortgage interest deduction limits dropped from $1 million to $750,000, while the business income deduction dropped from 39.6 percent to 20 percent.
“Is that enough to assuage some Republican lawmakers in states like New York, New Jersey, and California?” Tur asked.
Jordan replied, “I don’t think so, because their taxpayers are going to be hit. They’re going to be hit hard. And it does — it unfortunately is a bill that seems targeted toward areas that didn’t necessarily vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.”
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The Time columnist then bemoaned the fact that voters in federal and state elections shape the crafting and approval of national policies and programs.
In response, Tur warned that “some lawmakers were pretty frank about who they were trying to appease with this bill.”
“And they said, very frankly, this is the donors who are asking for this. The donors are the wealthiest Americans who give a lot to campaigns and give a lot to these lawmakers in order to get re-elected,” Tur continued. “Isn’t that the sort of admission that will come back to, I don’t know, haunt you in an ad going forward for 2018 or 2020?”
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter here.
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