AZ Congressional Delegation

Senate passes GOP tax bill, back to the House for final action of betrayal

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In the end, there was not a single Tea-Publican in the Senate to display courage and conviction of principles to vote against this abomination of a GOP tax bill finaced by $1.5 trillion in debt that future generations will pay. They all failed their “Profiles in Courage” moment.

The GOP’s plutocrat campaign donors and corporate masters demanded a tax cut they did not need and these lickspittle servants of the oligarchy kissed their feet and said  “yes master, your wish is my command.”

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning when decent people were asleep, the Republican Tax Bill Passed the Senate in a 51-48 Vote:

Republicans took a critical step toward notching their first significant legislative victory since assuming full political control, as the House and Senate voted along party lines on Tuesday and into early Wednesday to pass the most sweeping rewrite of the tax code in decades.

The $1.5 trillion tax bill, which is expected to head to President Trump’s desk in the coming days, will have broad effects on the economy, making deep and lasting cuts to corporate taxes as well as temporarily lowering individual taxes.

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House passes GOP tax bill on a party-line vote, moves to the Senate

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House Speaker Paul Ryan, “the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin,” was so overjoyed with achieving his boyhood dream of sticking it to the working class, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor — the “takers” as his running mate Mitt Romney once referred to them — that he was practically giddy.

That someone takes such pleasure in causing millions of Americans to suffer is pure evil.

The House has passed the abomination of the GOP tax bill on a party-line vote of 2227-203, with only a dozen Tea-Publicans voting no. House passes final tax bill, edging GOP closer to win:

Arizona Congressional Delegation: YEAHS: Biggs, Gosar, McSally, Schweikert; NAYS: Gallego, Grijalva, O’Halleran, Sinema. Not Voting: Franks (seat vacant).

The Senate is expected to pass the bill later on Tuesday, sending it to President Trump’s desk and allowing the GOP to achieve its goal of rewriting the tax code in Trump’s first year in office.

Multiple protesters interrupted House floor debate on the tax bill Tuesday, including people who shouted “kill the bill, don’t kill us!” as well as a woman in a wheelchair who said she relies on Medicaid and warned that the bill would “starve” the public.

One protester even interrupted Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as he delivered a floor speech that he’s wanted to give for decades in support of the tax overhaul.

“Today we are giving the [wealthy] people of this country their money back. This is their money, after all,” Ryan said.

A woman in the public visitors’ gallery then shouted, “You’re lying!”

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The D.C. Swamp: The ‘Corker Kickback’ in the GOP tax bill (Updated)

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Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) was recently hailed for being the only Tea-Publican in the Senate who voted aganst the terrible Senate GOP tax bill.  Then on Friday, he announced that he would support the GOP conference committee bill, which is marginally worse than the GOP Senate bill. WTF?

So what would cause Sen. Corker to sell out? John Cassidy of the New Yorker hinted at the reason in The Final Version of the G.O.P. Tax Bill Is a Corrupt, Cruel, Budget-Busting Hairball:

Another provision, which wasn’t in the House or Senate bills, allows real-estate developers who own buildings through L.L.C.s, as Trump does, to deduct twenty per cent of the income that these properties generate. To qualify for the break, the properties have to be newish ones that haven’t been fully depreciated. “This helps people who have held property for a while, like Donald Trump,” David Kamin, a law professor at New York University, told David Sirota and Josh Keefe, of the International Business Times.

Another beneficiary of this provision may well be Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who is also a real-estate investor. Corker had been the only Republican to vote against the Senate version of the tax bill, but on Friday he announced that he’d changed his mind, and that “after great thought and consideration, I believe this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make U.S. businesses domestically more productive and internationally more competitive is one we should not miss.” Corker didn’t mention his personal interests, but Sirota and Keefe did. “Federal records reviewed by IBT show that Corker has millions of dollars of ownership stakes in real-estate-related LLCs that could also benefit” from the final bill, they reported.

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McSally’s Holding Pattern

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By Michael Bryan Arizona has become one of the few states that are key to control of the U.S. Senate in 2018. With Flake declining to run for re-election and McCain facing the end of his life, both of Arizona’s Senate seats are in flux at a time when electoral tides are strongly disadvantaging Republicans. When … Read more

Michael Bloomberg on the #GopTaxScam

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Ady Barkan, an activist who has ALS and who works with the Center for Popular Democracy, has set up a web site titled stopgoptaxscam.com. It is a useful resource guide (h/t for the graphic, right).

Addressing the merits of the “GOP tax scam” is former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an op-ed appearing at his Bloomberg News website. This Tax Bill Is a Trillion-Dollar Blunder:

Last month a Wall Street Journal editor asked a room full of CEOs to raise their hands if the corporate tax cut being considered in Congress would lead them to invest more. Very few hands went up. Attending was Gary Cohn, President Donald Trump’s economic adviser and a friend of mine. He asked: “Why aren’t the other hands up?”

Allow me to answer that: We don’t need the money.

Corporations are sitting on a record amount of cash reserves: nearly $2.3 trillion. That figure has been climbing steadily since the recession ended in 2009, and it’s now double what it was in 2001. The reason CEOs aren’t investing more of their liquid assets has little to do with the tax rate.

CEOs aren’t waiting on a tax cut to “jump-start the economy” — a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company — or to hand out raises. It’s pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth, as Republicans have promised. Had Congress actually listened to executives, or economists who study these issues carefully, it might have realized that.

Instead, Congress did what it always does: It put politics first. After spending the first nine months of the year trying to jam through a repeal of Obamacare without holding hearings, heeding independent analysis or seeking Democratic input, Republicans took the same approach to tax “reform” — and it shows.

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