Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Solving yesterday's mystery of the sudden GOP love for all things Trump

I was a bit baffled yesterday when in the morning there was completely alignment between Trump and the GOP leadership. They were all pally pally on the Moore issue and all the GOP heavy weights in Senate and Congress were lining up to give us fond accounts of how they all gave Trump handjobs whenever he wanted it.

I couldn't figure out what had brought about this change of heart. And then I found out what was going on.

It appears in their haste to push the "Tax Cuts" through the Senate, the GOP screwed up.

With multiple drafts of the same bills floating around, they failed to notice that they had *eliminated* Corporate tax dodges *while* keeping the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) high! [1]

This is a major fuck up on part of Turtle & Co. ( I feel like McConnel is really good at the long game and really bad at tactical stuff. He just can't keep up with the fast dynamics).

For reasons I don't quite get Bob Murray (or all people) is all mad about this. [2] I can't really get my head around why Bob says anything, but some people say he just likes the attention.

Anywho - with this fuck up - Mitch McConnel needs Trump's help to retrieve the bill (and fix all the shit he screwed up). He also needs Trump to not go around pointing out GOP incompetence to donors. Especially at a time when Mitch might need them (oh... like for his re-election perhaps?) So he's playing nice with Trump.

Most of the others that were counting on having Mitch's support to keep Trump off their ass now find themselves in the wind. So they too have started sucking up to Trump in the hope that he doesn't land blame for Mitch's mistake on them.

In the previous post, I had said that Trump wants Mitch and Paul Ryan to kill the Russia investigation. There is no way Mitch and Paul can do that without hurting themselves badly. Now that they screwed up bigtime, Trump has leverage. My guess is that Trump will fire Mueller and Mitch+Paul will let that slide - at least until a public uproar forces them to undo it.

From the perspective of a democratic strategist, Mitch's fuck up is a god-send. This has now locked the entire GOP-Trump system into a mutual collapse more - neither can live while the other survives.

4 Comments:

At 1:50 PM, Blogger Ralphy said...

still has to go through a mark up committee to resolve differences between the senate version and the house version. they can make changes to the bill if mutually agreeable to all members of the committee. once that's done a pro forma vote will be passed by the house and the senate enacting the new tax code.

and, there is a budget shut down looming over the immigration dreamer nullification act.

 
At 8:32 AM, Blogger maverick said...

There is a ton of errors in the tax cut, it feels like someone on serious drugs wrote the thing.

What a complete fuck up.

 
At 9:25 AM, Blogger Ralphy said...

its called trying to please all the special interest groups resulting in unintended consequences.

 
At 9:32 AM, Blogger maverick said...


Yep!

It is very difficult to please everyone at the same time.

The GOP has basically signed on to Trump's promises of producing radical changes in very short time scales.

That is where this is going to fall apart completely.

 

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