Some Democrats are hopeful about the opportunity for bipartisanship on a tax bill due to the slim Republican majority in the House, along with major disagreements within the GOP conference, The Hill reported on Monday.
"If this were a party that wanted to negotiate with the minority party, and I'm thinking that the margins are so narrow that under ordinary circumstances they would negotiate with us, there are things that we probably could negotiate about," Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Hill.
House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries also recently said there could be certain tax issues where his caucus and the GOP could find common ground.
This is so because the lack of clarity among Republicans and the difficulty in uniting the GOP around a tax bill could torpedo efforts to pass a measure along partisan lines through budget reconciliation.
Anything short of near-unanimous House Republican backing for a partisan bill to extend President-elect Donald Trump's tax-cut law could force the GOP to work with Democrats on the issue, according to the Hill.
In particular, there is widespread interest by Democrats to strengthen the child tax credit and the low-income housing tax credit, Jeffries said, with Moore declaring that Democrats are also interested in reinstating the research-and-development tax credit for businesses.
Republicans in Congress are aware of the threat to their tax cuts posed by their narrow majority in the House, with Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the incoming Senate Finance Committee chair, telling The Hill that "everybody's concerned about that."
"There's a significant amount of non-TCJA tax policy under consideration," he said. "I don't know whether all of it can get done, but I'm not saying it can't. We'll do our best to evaluate all the proposals and fit in as much as we can."
Despite some shared interests between the parties and enough internal Republican conflict to have Democrats reaching out a hand, disagreements on tax policy are plentiful, with Moore saying the 2017 Trump tax cuts amounted to little more than "crumbs from the master's table" for people making less than $100,000 a year.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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