MORE ON THAT TAX BILL: Let’s not bury the lead too much here, either — it might not matter if Schumer makes the Wyden-Smith plan a priority, given the current depth of opposition among Senate Republicans. The Washington Post had a more optimistic view of where things stand on the tax measure, with supporters arguing that either there is still a chance to make concessions that would attract enough Senate GOP support or that enough Republicans would get behind the bill if Schumer brings it to the floor. Certainly, it’d be simpler for the tax bill’s skeptics if Schumer decided not to force a vote on the tax bill. The measure’s supporters also believe it would make sense politically to bring it to the floor even if it went down in defeat, to essentially make Senate Republicans take ownership of that outcome. But there also remains plenty of reason to believe that enough Republicans would decide against backing a tax bill that wasn’t blessed by Crapo — and questions about whether the overall political will behind the Wyden-Smith plan might evaporate before it could potentially even get to the floor. TAKING A STEP BACK: How lawmakers have handled this bipartisan tax bill certainly has people wondering about how they’ll tackle next year’s much broader negotiations over the expiring parts of the GOP’s 2017 tax law. And one of those bigger questions is whether the business lobby has the same kind of sway that it has historically owned with Republicans, now that the Senate GOP is effectively blocking a measure that would restore tax breaks for research spending, writing off capital investments and deducting interest on debt. As Pro Tax’s Brian Faler notes this morning, the Wyden-Smith plan hasn’t been stuck in the Senate because of a lack of trying from the business community, with lobbyists holding countless meetings on the Hill, launching a range of advocacy campaigns and huddling among themselves to try to foster a breakthrough for the bill. The quandary for the business lobby isn’t just that the Senate GOP is standing in the way of the bill. It’s that the issues that Republicans are raising about the bill seem pretty small ball, at least in the business community’s mind, like the so-called lookback provision for the child tax credit. That’s made it harder for K Street to understand why GOP senators won’t get behind a bill that would bring back these tax breaks that even Crapo has said he’s spent years trying to do. More broadly, the current impasse over the bipartisan tax bill also spurs fresh questions about the longer-term relationship between business and Republicans, particularly with many GOP officials increasingly unsure about the social stands taken by corporate America. A caveat, maybe: It’s probably worth noting that House Republicans basically did the exact opposite of the Senate GOP, largely accepting the Wyden-Smith plan as a win-win for its CTC expansion and more generous tax breaks for business. So while lobbyists are definitely talking about the status of their relationship with the GOP, some of them will also argue that there are still plenty of Republicans who are champions of supply-side tax policy, even with everything currently swirling around.
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