Concerns over the second tax bill are largely flowing from the Republican side, mainly from members fighting to keep hold of seats in suburban districts where President Donald Trump is most unpopular. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Tax At-risk House Republicans say no to new tax bill The White House and GOP House leaders are pushing a second tax reform before the midterms.

The White House and top congressional Republicans want to push for a House vote on a second round of tax cuts ahead of the midterms in hopes of bolstering their economic pitch to voters — but they’re running into opposition within their own party.

GOP leaders conceived of the second tax bill as a messaging win that would put Democrats on their heels ahead of the midterms, forcing them to vote against tax relief for the middle class. But the concerns over the bill are largely flowing from the Republican side, mainly from members fighting to keep hold of seats in suburban districts where President Donald Trump is most unpopular — and that are key to the GOP’s hopes of keeping their majority.


A dozen House Republicans, all but one of them from the high-tax states of California, New Jersey and New York, voted against the tax law in December because it capped state and local tax deductions, which they said would lead to tax increases on too many of their constituents.

Some of those GOP lawmakers have openly said they would prefer to leave the tax issue alone as Congress also grapples with how to fund the government and the House potentially votes on health care measures that might be more politically beneficial to vulnerable incumbents. “If we were to pass that here in the House, it would be an exercise in futility, because it could never pass in the Senate,” Rep. Leonard Lance of New Jersey, who opposed the first bill, said Friday on CNBC.

Top House leaders will unveil the second tax overhaul bill this week. Drafted by House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the bill proposes to make permanent individual tax rate cuts from the Republicans’ first tax bill, while introducing new measures intended to help families save money, especially for retirement, and to spur innovation for businesses.

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House leaders and White House officials hope it can at least pass through that chamber before the election. The Senate is not expected to take up the bill in 2018 given the focus on speeding through judicial nominations and a Supreme Court confirmation — and because Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) simply does not have the votes to pass a second tax bill.

Republican leaders “certainly directed us from the get-go to be ready to move this in September,” Brady told reporters last week. “It’s full steam ahead.”

GOP officials have long acknowledged that they couldn’t pack all of their priorities into a measure that eventually become last year’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, because no Democrats supported the bill. They passed it with a slim margin of votes using a budgetary measure called reconciliation, which required only a simple majority in the Senate, and have long wanted to revisit the bill’s tweaks to the individual side of the tax code. Those changes are scheduled to expire after 2025, while the corporate tax changes became permanent under the new law.

This time, the White House and Treasury Department largely have taken a back seat in drafting the bill, though Brady, President Donald Trump, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have remained in close touch as the bill progressed. Ways and Means lawmakers also visited the White House in July to discuss the bill, and the committee is expected to mark up the new measure on Thursday after releasing legislative text early this week.

The White House’s main concern is that the individual tax cuts are made permanent, said one Republican close to the White House, calling the other proposals more “nickel-and-dime” stuff. Mnuchin and Ivanka Trump also have visited Capitol Hill to discuss various parts of the bill, according to one administration official.

Shahira Knight, the relatively new White House director of legislative affairs, who helped write the Republicans' first tax bill in close concert with top economic staffers and lawmakers, will help shepherd this 2.0 bill through the House, in addition to tackling the farm and multiple spending bills. Since the first tax bill passed, one of Trump’s top informal economic advisers, Larry Kudlow, has become director of the National Economic Council, putting into the White House a firm champion of cutting taxes to spur economic growth.

Some administration officials have expressed regret about the way the individual side of the tax code turned out under the Republican tax bill. “The part of tax reform to me that was so important was really the corporate side,” said Gary Cohn, the White House’s former top economic adviser, at a Washington event in June. “One thing that haunts me,” however, is that Republicans were not able to make the individual income-tax cuts permanent, he said.

Democrats have criticized the amount of stock buybacks that have followed the tax law and maintain the law has done little to help the average worker, and they are likely to pound those themes again when discussing the second bill.

Democrats might have run from that fight in the past, given how often Republicans label them tax hikers. But these days, they are more than happy to relitigate last year’s tax law, which they have insisted from the start would heap savings onto corporations and the wealthy while leaving behind the middle class.

The more even ground on taxes shows up in polling, too. The new tax law has not been the political plus that many Republicans expected as they try to hold on to the House, only becoming less popular since the beginning of the year.

The House Republican preview of the new bill also floated a range of new tools for families to increase savings, including creating a new Universal Savings Account and making it easier to contribute to Individual Retirement Accounts.

Lawmakers and aides in both parties say it’s possible that retirement provisions could pass as part of a year-end tax deal after the election. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the panel’s top Democrat, previously have teamed up on bipartisan retirement savings legislation.

“My feeling is that it’s fine. It is certainly smart to make the tax cuts permanent, but it is not urgent, because those don’t expire for many years,” said Stephen Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and informal economic adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I would still support the bill because it is probably a good thing for Republicans to always be on the offensive on cutting taxes.”

