President Donald Trump also suggested his tax reform effort will generate so much revenue that it will pay for a massive infrastructure bill. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images Trump floats bipartisan tax reform group But Republicans have been hard at work crafting an all-GOP plan.

President Donald Trump suggested at a meeting with senators Wednesday that the Senate create a bipartisan working group for tax reform, surprising Republicans who've been planning to pass a party-line bill, senators said afterward.

As the Senate worked to advance a budget that would set up a partisan tax reform bill on Wednesday, the president repeatedly indicated at a lunch with senators from both parties that he wanted a bipartisan process headed by Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), senators said. While everyone in the room nodded along with Trump’s hopes for bipartisanship, there was no agreement among senators to actually create such a group, which is viewed by some Republicans as redundant to the existing Finance Committee.


“The president basically asked them to work on that," said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). But "that’s what we do as a (finance) committee. I don’t really personally see the benefit of creating additional structure. I think we’ve got all the tools we need.”

Republicans already have a partisan tax framework to reduce corporate rates, alter individual tax brackets and increase the standard deduction. Democrats largely oppose this plan, and Republicans are skeptical that opening it up to new negotiations would pay any dividends. Cornyn said he is "always" skeptical of Democrats being serious about negotiating with the GOP on a tax plan.

“It depends. Sometimes you have people are very sincere. And sometimes you have people playing politics all the time. If you get one of those, it’s tougher,” Hatch said in an interview. “This is touchy stuff here."

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Trump also suggested his tax reform effort will generate so much revenue that it will pay for a massive infrastructure bill, according to one senator in attendance. The senator came away with the impression that Trump is eager to cut a massive deal with Democrats on taxes and infrastructure.

Granted anonymity, Republicans said afterward pursuing doing tax reform as a bipartisan exercise would be a “distraction” from their hopes of quickly ramming through a tax cut bill over the next two or three months. A new round of negotiations would waste valuable time, and GOP senators said they wanted to concentrate on what they have down on paper already, despite Democratic opposition.

Time constraints matter, said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), adding that Republicans didn’t outright reject Trump’s working group idea.

“It’s always helpful to have a broad discussion,” Toomey said. “But we’re also not going to change our schedule. We’re going to get this done.”

A bipartisan working group would come to far different conclusions if it were intended to get the votes of more liberal Democrats like Wyden or Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Republicans said they were unlikely to blow up the entire process to create a new framework with Democrats despite Trump's suggestion.

That's because the gulf between Republicans and Democrats appears impossible to bridge, other than a trio of moderate Democrats who are open to working with the GOP on their plan.

“You look at the [Republican proposal] and you see this Grand Canyon-sized gap,” Wyden said afterward. “I said, ‘The real challenge, Mr. President, is that there is a very big gap between the rhetoric and the reality that is on a piece of paper.’”

Colin Wilhelm contributed to this report.