The Republican tax reform package is almost home-free.
A procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate means the House of Representatives will return on Wednesday to vote on a slightly modified version of the tax bill it passed Tuesday. After House speaker Paul Ryan gleefully gaveled the vote, but before the Senate parliamentarian determined three provisions had to be stricken from the bill, President Donald Trump tweeted this:
At the risk of repeating the Rose Garden victory party after the House passed Obamacare repeal earlier this year, the president has every reason to celebrate. The tax bill may be polling poorly as it heads to Trump’s desk, but he and the Republican party head into next year’s midterm election cycle with a substantive legislative accomplishment they can argue is helping boost the economy. Read more... |
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| Mark It Down—“We anticipate that they're going to go up as more and more of these things continue to happen and particularly as more and more people start to feel the impact of the booming economy, the tax cuts that will take place later tonight and go into effect in the first part of February.” —White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on President Trump’s low approval ratings, December 19, 2017 |
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It’s no secret that the GOP tax bill is good news for businessmen like Donald Trump, who stand to benefit from a modest cut to the highest federal tax bracket, a reduction to the estate tax, and dramatic cuts to business income. But on Tuesday, as the House was voting on the package, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not refute Trump’s repeated insistences that the tax bill was going to “kill” him financially.
“We expect that it likely will—certainly on the personal side—cost the president a lot of money,” Sanders said.
Trump, in contrast with the GOP messaging on the tax bill (and the text of the bill itself), has spent the last few months describing its impact on the rich in apocalyptic tones.
“My accountant called me and said, ‘you’re going to get killed in this bill,’” Trump said in November. “The deal is so bad for rich people, I had to throw in the estate tax just to give them something.” |
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UFO Watch—So what is President Trump’s position on UFOs? The White House won’t say.
“Several media reports have disclosed the existence of a secret Pentagon program that was researching UFOs,” the Hill’s Jordan Fabian asked, referring to a New York Times story from last week. “Funding ran out for that in 2012. Does the president believe in UFOs? And would he be interested in restoring funding for that program?”
“Somehow, that question hasn’t come up in our back-and-forth over the last couple days,” a grinning Sanders replied, “but I will check into that and be happy to circle back.” |
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The Washington Post’s story from late last week that the Trump administration was banning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using certain words in budget request documents went viral (pardon the pun). But over at National Review Online, Yuval Levin, a former staffer at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the George W. Bush White House, pours cold water on the hot take that the Trump administration was exerting some sort of censorship on the CDC.
Levin, after talking with officials at HHS, concludes the style guide was most likely a way for bureaucrats to not “raise red flags among Republicans in Congress” in their budget request. Here’s more: In other words, what happened regarding these other terms (“transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based”) was not that retrograde Republicans ordered career CDC officials not to use these terms but that career CDC officials assumed retrograde Republicans would be triggered by such words and, in an effort to avoid having such Republicans cut their budgets, reasoned they might be best avoided. With regard to “evidence-based” and “science-based” in particular, I gather the reasoning was simpler than that, and that the group thought these terms are so overused in the CDC budget documents they were discussing as to become nearly meaningless and that their use should be limited to where it actually made a point. |
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Movie Trailer of the Day—I’m a big fan of the Vegas heist film Ocean’s 11 and was skeptical when I heard there would be a female-casted spin-off. But I have to say, I’m intrigued by the new trailer, mostly thanks to a stellar cast including Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett. Watch the trailer below:
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| Obamacare Watch—The editors have a new editorial warning Republicans against supporting a year-end Obamacare bailout bill that creates new funding for elective abortions. “We hope Republicans would not be so foolish and unprincipled as to affirmatively send tax dollars to fund insurance plans that cover elective abortions,” reads the editorial. “The issue could be easily addressed by adding Hyde amendment language, or by putting any new health-care funding in laws to which the Hyde amendment is permanently attached.” |
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Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert told reporters Tuesday morning that the WannaCry virus, which encrypted files on infected computers and demanded the user pay a ransom to recover them, bore evidence of “technical links to previously identified North Korean cyber tools, tradecraft, operational infrastructure.”
“North Korea has acted especially badly, largely unchecked, for more than a decade,” Bossert said. “Its malicious behavior is growing more egregious, and stopping that malicious behavior starts with this step of accountability.”
Bossert said that the White House had taken its time blaming the Kim regime in order to make sure their accusation was reliable. Read more... |
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