How disruptive is Trump (Part 1)?
House Republicans voted for a health care bill Trump strongly supported, so much so that he held a White House ceremony when it passed, only to later bash the bill as "mean." Every single Republican in Congress is very aware of that, and knows it could happen again. In fact, just this week a report said Trump had turned against the provision in the tax bill framework eliminating state and local tax deductions despite having previously signed off on it. Now, a simple tax cut wouldn't include that anyway, so it was pretty much dead before Trump said anything. But the key point is that Republicans will vote for this bill knowing that they will make themselves vulnerable not only to attacks from Democrats, but also from the Republican president insisting they vote for it. That will tend to make them more likely to just give up if they run into trouble, rather than pushing as hard as they can for a deal.
How disruptive is Trump (Part 2)?
I doubt if Trump's various feuds with Bob Corker, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and other Republican senators will cost him any votes when it comes right down to it. Members of Congress usually vote based on all sorts of reasons, but personal animus against the president isn't normally one of them. Normally. This isn't a normal president, and there's no guarantee that none of them won't seek their revenge.
Just how dysfunctional are House Republicans?
Even if all of them want a tax bill to pass, there's still the House Freedom Caucus to contend with -- a group which disdains compromise and is almost entirely dedicated to letting the perfect be the enemy of the (from their perspective at least) good. Will they insist on adding controversial provisions to a bill otherwise acceptable to the entire Republican conference in both chambers? Or will any other group within the House attempt a similar ploy? And Speaker Paul Ryan and the rest of the House Republican leadership have failed to demonstrate the skills to work out the problems caused by factions within the party, including between the two chambers.
How badly do they want it?
That's really the most important question. They almost certainly want this to happen more than they wanted health care to pass, for a variety of reasons. Despite all the dysfunction among Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there's really no strong reason that they couldn't do a simple, deficit-increasing, ten-year tax cut. If enough of them, and enough of their constituents and other supporters, want to do it badly enough. And it's very hard to know whether that's the case or not.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.