Republicans Prepare to Fall in Love (With Tax Reform)

What have we learned from the first day of marking up the House Republicans’ big tax reform bill? There’s a long way to go, with lots of tweaks and alterations to be made to the bill House Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady released last week. There are plenty of factions in the House GOP conference, from fiscal hawks on the conservative side to Northeasterners from high-tax states, to balance. To top it off, a small Republican margin in the Senate means there’s little room to maneuver.

But the White House has some quiet confidence about the last chance to get a big legislative accomplishment in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. Publicly, the administration’s push has been light and to friendly outlets—Vice President Mike Pence spoke about the plan on Sunday with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, and Ivanka Trump and Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin touted it Monday with Tucker Carlson—while House leaders such as Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy have been a more public face. The White House’s main role has been giving encouragement and reassurance to members of Congress. “Let the legislative process play out” is a mantra in the West Wing these days.

One person I spoke with in the White House says there’s a sense of unity among Republicans on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue on the top-line goals of tax reform—lowering taxes on the middle class, simplifying the code, lowering corporate rates—as well as an understanding that this is a unique opportunity for making the biggest changes to federal tax law in more than three decades. The White House hopes it can exploit those shared goals better than it did on repealing Obamacare. That’s part of the aim behind the multiple public appearances Trump has made since August to try to sell tax reform in the country, in states with vulnerable Democratic senators.

The intended message of all of this is Trump will put in the work and have Republicans’ backs, because he’s invested in getting a tax reform bill passed.

Must-Read of the Day—Elliott Abrams, writing for the New York Times, breaks down the jarring moves going on in Saudi Arabia’s highest levels of government. The crown prince, the 32-year-old, relatively moderate Mohammed bin Salman, has arrested nearly a dozen ministers (who are also members of different branches of the House of Saud). Here’s Abrams setting the scene for what this all means: