Mitch McConnell Begs the Democrats to Forget About Trump and Pass Tax Reform

Mitch McConnell imagines Capitol Hill Republican lawmakers might be more popular with their Democratic rivals than President Donald Trump.

Without a doubt, the Democratic left has made it clear that it regards all and any cooperation with the Trump administration as a betrayal of its deepest moral imperative. Namely, #resisttrump.

This is clear even on issues where the Trump administration has signaled a willingness to cooperate with Democrats. When Donald Trump made a deal with Senator Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to fund the government and work together on the DACA illegal alien issue, liberal activists balked.

So it has always been most likely that Capitol Hill Democrats would refuse to support the tax reform proposals put out by the Trump White House and GOP leadership. But many Republican leaders, including Mitch McConnell and Trump administration officials, insisted that they still had a chance of getting Democratic votes for a tax reform bill.  Didn’t some Democrats once support Reagan’s tax overhaul?

That notion has now been mugged by reality. Democrats have been attacking the proposal day in and day out, describing it as a giveaway for the rich and corporations that  would hurt the poor and the middle class. In fact, larger child tax credits, particularly if they are refundable or can be used to reduce payroll taxes, would be a boon to most middle-class American families.

So now GOP lawmakers have a new tactic: ask Democrats to pass tax reform not because of Trump but depsite him.

In an op-ed for NBC News, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell complains that Democrats are opposing tax reform ideas that they supported before Trump took office.  The tax proposal, McConnell writes, would lower tax rates, simplify the tax code, double the standard deduction, increase child tax credits, eliminate loopholes and make it easier to keep jobs in America.

“These are the goals of tax reform. they have traditionally been bipartisan. here in the Senate, the need for tax reform is loudly supported by Democrats–or at least it was, until the last election,” McConnell writes. “Now, Democrats are under pressure from the left to oppose just about everything President Donald Trump touches–even ideas they themselves used to promote.”

While the reality of #theresistance may have given McConnell’s dreams of bipartisan tax reform a beating, it has not yet killed it off. The title of his op-ed: “Democrats Must Forget About Trump and Jon the GOP on Tax Reform.”

“I hope they will work with us in a serious way to get this crucial reform accomplished for our country,” McConnell writes.

So McConnell is not exactly embracing #war yet.