Dana Milbank: Not hearing what they want to, GOP simply ignores

In the beginning, there were alternative facts. Now we are being governed in an alternate reality.

Heading toward approval of their tax bill last week, House Republicans had a teensy problem: Their vaunted tax “cut” actually was a tax hike for millions of Americans. It lowered taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars on the wealthiest, but it raised the lowest tax rate and, official congressional arbiters determined, raised taxes on a good chunk of the middle class as well.

Awkward! Particularly because a long-standing House rule, put in place by Republicans after Newt Gingrich’s 1994 takeover, requires that any “income tax rate increase may not be considered as passed … unless so determined by a vote of not less than three-fifths of the members voting.”

So Republicans did the honorable thing: They snuck in a provision that allowed them, with a simple majority vote, to declare that the three-fifths requirement “shall not apply.” Problem solved.

This is but one example of an unnerving trend in the Trump era: Ignore the rules and disqualify the referees who were put in place to enforce standards of integrity.

Just two months ago, President Trump promised that “the rich will not be gaining at all” under the tax bill, and “it’ll be the largest tax decrease in the history of our country for the middle class.”

It is exactly the opposite. The bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) found that the rich would get a handsome tax break under the House bill, but those earning $20,000 to $40,000 and $200,000 to $500,0000 would get an increase. On Thursday, the JCT, the official congressional arbiter of tax legislation, determined that the Senate version of the bill would give large tax cuts to millionaires but raise taxes on families earning between $10,000 and $75,000.

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