At a press conference earlier this month, a reporter challenged House Speaker Paul Ryan’s assertion that Republicans need to pass their tax bill in order to remain politically viable going into 2018 — when history suggests the opposite might actually be true.
After all, congresses controlled by Democrats passed major initiatives in 1993 and 2010 before being swept out of power in subsequent midterm elections. How was this tax plan, a version of which has since been approved in the House while another comes under scrutiny in the Senate, going to save the GOP next year?
Ryan’s answer, in short: The Democratic bills — the 1993 crime legislation and Obamacare — were “unpopular,” while the Republican tax plan, he said, “is not unpopular.”
“And by the way,” he added, “this is something we ran on. We didn’t — we didn’t do like some of the Democrat majorities of the past, and pass some big, huge thing on an unsuspecting country. We ran in 2016 on doing this tax reform. The president ran on doing this tax cut and tax reform.”
Setting aside the questionable nature of Ryan’s election analysis, and memory of last year’s campaign, let’s consider the part of these remarks most easily subject to empirical evaluation — that the GOP plan is “not unpopular.”
By all available public metrics, that is false. (One caveat: Ryan never quite specified the group that considered it favorably. Perhaps he just meant Republicans or Wall Street bigs?) A Quinnipiac poll released a few days later revealed the depth of dissatisfaction, among voters, with the Republican tax agenda. Only a quarter of respondents viewed it favorably, with 52% saying they disapproved. Among Republicans, support was at an even 60%, while only 20% of independents approved. Perhaps most notably, just 34% of whites without college degrees — among President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters in 2016 — said they backed the plan. Other polling, like this from CNN in mid-October, found about the same.
And yet, the tax bill — after some tweaks — seems like Republicans’ best chance to put something substantive on Trump’s desk this year. How can that be?
There is nothing novel about a party in power flexing its muscles regardless of public sentiment. Though hardly a surprise to anyone who followed the 2008 campaign (as Ryan suggested), the Affordable Care Act was not polling well when then-President Barack Obama signed it in March 2010, and — despite then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pledge that those numbers would flip when the public felt its effects — the law mostly stayed underwater for the rest of Obama’s time in office. (It’s become more popular as an endangered species.)
Still, you’ll have a hard time finding a Democrat today who (openly) regrets having passed it. In a March 2017 op-ed, former Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello, at the time a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, attributed his ouster from Congress in 2010 to his vote for Obamacare — but said he had no regrets, and that “in voting to pass the ACA, I made a long-term bet that it would save lives well worth the short-term political costs.”
Politicians are often pilloried for doing just about anything to obtain or preserve their offices. But there are indeed occasions, like with the passage of Obamacare, when they will cast personally damning votes to advance fundamental policy goals. The prospect of passing massive tax cuts for corporations has been a priority — and not exactly a secret one! — for Republicans for decades. (Ryan’s remarks hold up on that count.) There are many in the party who surely view this as a perfectly suitable hill upon which to die.
For many on the left and, per recent polling, maybe a handful on the right, any comparison between health care and taxes will register as a maddening false equivalence. Indeed, if Republicans move forward with efforts to repeal Obamacare while seeking tax cuts for corporations, they’ll basically be scripting Democratic attacks ads for 2018. But that’s all missing the point. No matter how one views the policy and its effects, the underlying imperatives have a lot in common. Like Democrats seven years ago, Republicans are now determined to spend their political capital — while they have it.
The logic here, whether explicit or implied, is simple enough. If it comes down to (a) doing nothing, then getting swept out of office next year, or (b) doing something, then getting swept out of office next year (as history and the prevailing wisdom suggest is nearly inevitable), the decision becomes a whole lot easier — and those poll numbers cited up top a lot less daunting. Particularly so for members who might be looking for private-sector work after being unseated.
Does it make passage a lock? No. The Republican majority in the Senate is narrow. And Republican senators, as compared with their colleagues in the House, tend to have more nuanced views of the political moment. Some, like Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Arizona’s Jeff Flake, are known deficit hawks. (The current bill would raise it.) Corker and Flake are also openly disdainful of Trump. (The White House is desperate for major legislation to sign.) Other GOP critics, on and off the Hill, argue that the plan is a betrayal of their promise to cut taxes for everyone. (The bill would, sooner or later, raise them for millions.)
The sum result: Republicans are, again, caught between politics and policy. Where one makes action necessary, and maybe inevitable, the other threatens the party’s future — in the coming elections and beyond, if the brand is harmed.
It’s a difficult choice with only one sure result: Republicans in Congress are more likely to pay a price than gather a reward.