The Senate appears to drawing closer and closer to passing their outrageous declaration of class warfare against everyday Americans that they have the gall to call a “tax reform” bill.
In their desperate efforts to cobble together a package that appeals to both deficit hawks and the more shameless plutocrats in the Republican Party, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his cronies are rewriting the bill behind closed doors, with no CBO score, no economic analysis, and no Democratic contributions.
The regularest order.
Me: When are we going to see the tax bill?
Graham: Ummm…today?
Me: Have YOU seen it?
Graham: I’ve seen the Cliff Notes.— Alice Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) December 1, 2017
This tax bill is literally getting worse by the minute yet Republicans are desperate to pass it – before we can even read it or the CBO can score it.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 1, 2017
Not even all the Senate Republicans have seen it.
But the Senate Republicans do have a list of demands from corporate lobbyists on K-Street that they are quickly jamming into the bill at the last second – a list that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) shared with the public.
This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown. None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them. pic.twitter.com/Mn0i56JeZg
— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) December 1, 2017
Let that sink in. The Senators of the United States Congress have not read the amendments to the bill that will reshape the economic landscape of the United States as we know it but the lobbyists have.
Many of those lobbyists and the special interest exemptions they’re writing in to the bill just so happen to benefit those close to the Senators – consider, for instance, a reduction in the taxes paid on imported alcohol that was filed by Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) that will save the alcohol industry $4.2 billion a year.
His son just so happens to be an alcohol lobbyist.
Once again, the Republicans are discarding every protocol and every shred of pretense at adhering to regular order in the Senate, knowing that with today’s shocking revelations from disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn about the President and his team’s involvement in the Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, now is do-or-die time for them – and they’ve chosen “die” for the rest of us.
They are about to commit a heinous act of political heresy so heinous its hard to understand how they are able to walk without leaving burning footprints in their wake.
This naked display of disdain for the spirit of democratic lawmaking and for the interests of the people they ostensibly represent is the ultimate and inevitable consequence of allowing the wealthy to use their ill-gotten gains to corrupt our political system and use it as a weapon to wage class war against the rest of us.
