Donald Trump has reportedly been irritated that the failed attempt to repeal Obamacare was taking time away from his own pet issue: cutting taxes for the filthy rich. Team Trump says they have big plans for tax "reform.” They want it to be "their" issue.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said earlier this week that President Donald Trump is “driving the train” on tax reform, a move that goes against the grain of recent history.
Guess what? House Republicans aren't interested in Trump's plans. They've got their own plans, and in their minds Trump can sod off. Worse, House Republicans are worried that Team Trump piping up with their own, ahem, “ideas” will crater the whole effort.
They’ve been working on their own tax-reform proposal for more than a year and, after countless hours of work, don’t want to suddenly give up those designs just because the administration is now working on its own plan. Some worry the White House could drop a policy bomb in their midst just as reform seems within reach for the first time in decades.
They're not wrong to think so; Team Trump's policy chops have so far resulted in a "travel ban" that was a fiasco and healthcare "negotiations" in which nobody in the Republican Party could quite figure out which side the White House was on and who they were negotiating with. So House Republicans want Trump to scuttle whatever he imagines his own ideas to be, and just support whatever House Republicans want to do.
“We have so much in common with the Trump administration — it wouldn’t make sense to have a separate bill from Secretary Mnuchin, a separate one from Gary Cohn, a third from whomever,” Brady told Fox Business News, referring to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Trump’s economic adviser.
“Why not take the basis of the House plan?”
The setup here, then, is almost exactly what it was during the Obamacare repeal fight. Paul Ryan and his House Republicans have been developing "plans" for what they'd do if they were in charge for years—and the details of those plans are likely to be wildly unpopular when actually released, because like the Obamacare repeal their "tax reform" plans are expected to focus almost entirely on cutting taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich by raising taxes and slashing services for everybody else. Team Trump will be wandering in with a series of campaign promises that nobody has any intention of keeping and a team of "negotiators" that don't have the foggiest idea what they're actually doing.
Then there will be a huge fight between the Ryan faction (that wants to do as much as they possibly can get away with), the Freedom Caucus (which will insist on doing at least 50 percent more than that), and President Steve Bannon, who will wander through the halls yelling that each congressperson should do whatever the White House tells them to do or they will all Rue The Day, and so forth.
It turns out governing is hard. It's even harder when your party's purity tests have systemically eliminated anyone who might have some idea how to do it, and harder still when your ideas are so terrible that the only way you can get them passed is if the public doesn't know what they are. No matter what happens, this is going to be a mess