A bigger question is whether it signals a change within the Republican Party. | Getty and AP Photos Republicans stop talking tax cuts

Something is missing from this year’s midterm elections.

Republicans are talking about ISIL and President Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act and Harry Reid. But what they aren’t talking about?


Slashing tax rates.

Though tax cuts have been a mainstay of their campaigns since at least Ronald Reagan, though the top marginal tax rate is now the highest since the 1980s, though the party could win control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in almost a decade, Republicans are barely mentioning reducing tax rates with voters.

“In a campaign, you talk about what people are interested in,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “I keep notes on all my town meetings” and “tax cuts haven’t come up.”

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It’s a turnabout for a party sometimes mocked as maniacally focused on tax cuts, and a big switch from the last time voters went to the polls, when lawmakers clashed over the fate of trillions in Bush-era tax cuts. It also amounts to a little-noticed boon this election season to Democrats, who’ve long been pummeled over whether the public deserved tax “relief.”

A bigger question is whether it also signals a change within the Republican Party.

Some lawmakers — including ones no one would confuse for moderates — said they’re less interested in tax cuts than tax reform, a subtle distinction that has major political and policy implications.

Republicans can cut tax rates in a Tax Code overhaul, but not without making wrenching changes elsewhere, as they‘ll need to replace the revenue lost to the Treasury. That means there will be losers — lots of them — unlike, say, with George W. Bush’s tax cuts, when the main question facing Republicans was how to distribute the goodies.

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But with overall revenue levels about in line with historical averages and the economy still soft, some Republicans are looking past the party’s old playbook on taxes.

“We have to stop being one-trick ponies,” said California Rep. John Campbell, a member of the arch-conservative Republican Study Committee and the No. 4 Republican on the House Budget Committee.

“I want to see taxes come down, but it’s not a panacea,” he said. “It won’t cure all our ills. We can’t say tax cuts will cure this, cure that and cure the other thing, because it’s just not credible.” He said, “The purpose of tax reform is not to cut revenue to the government or to cut taxes — it’s to grow the economy.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said: “People are more concerned with what’s fair and necessary in taxes than they are about an individual tax cut or tax increase for themselves.”

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Republicans are moving beyond arguments about whether “it should be this rate versus that,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“The era of tax reform and overhauling the Tax Code is replacing [an emphasis on] numbers,” he said. “A flatter tax with less deductions is the new mantra.”

It’s a surprising epilogue to the more than decadelong battle over the Bush tax cuts that lawmakers only settled last year, on the edge of the so-called fiscal cliff. Lawmakers permanently extended most rates, which were set to rise without action, though they allowed the top rate to increase to 39.6 percent. That, along with new taxes within Obamacare, pushed the actual top rate to almost 45 percent.

Though still low by historical standards, that’s the highest since the Reagan administration. Republicans once argued that allowing the increase would wreak havoc on the economy, but lawmakers say their constituents are now more focused on issues like the battle against Islamic militants in Syria.

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“I don’t think anybody thought this was going to be a foreign policy election, and it’s evolved into that because of what the Russians and ISIL are doing,” said Cole.

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) sees antipathy toward Democratic leaders trumping any concerns with tax rates.

“Barack Obama and Harry Reid — that’s all you need in your platform,” he said. “The frustration and distrust of this administration and the Senate under Harry Reid is sufficient to wipe out the details on everything else.”

But it’s not just voters who have changed their priorities.

A rise in government red ink has cooled some Republicans’ ardor for old-fashioned tax cuts. Though the deficit has fallen dramatically in recent years, the debt — at 74 percent of gross domestic product — has almost doubled since 2008. And government spending is projected to soar in coming years, as waves of retiring baby boomers begin collecting Social Security and Medicare.

“You really can’t do tax cuts alone, because you still have a screwed-up tax system” and then “you just have a revenue problem when you do that,” said Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas), who was first elected as part of the tea party class of 2010.

“Maybe we take a more holistic, maybe sophisticated look at the Tax Code than, perhaps, say, George Bush did in 2000,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), another RSC member. “Just saying ‘cut taxes’ doesn’t actually encompass the challenges that we face,” he said. “Maybe it’s no longer the only message.”

Grover Norquist, the influential head of Americans for Tax Reform, chalked up the lack of tax talk this year to the news media’s focus on other issues and rejected suggestions that Republicans’ enthusiasm for old-fashioned rate cuts has waned.

“Do I wish everybody would talk about taxes all day?” he asked. “Yes, in the same way that ministers wish everybody would read the Bible all day. But am I reasonably happy that the congregation has a Bible and knows what they’re doing? Yes.”

Republicans’ tax-cutting fervor may have been tempered by the tax reform proposal pushed earlier this year by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.).

Camp cut the top rate, though only by taking a chainsaw to scads of popular breaks, such as the mortgage interest deduction. And though House Republicans had been promising for years to slash the top rate to 25 percent, Camp got it down to only 35 percent. Even that was more onerous than advertised because his plan applied to a broader definition of taxable income. The health care benefits of the well-to-do, for example, would have been taxed.

Camp emphasized not the rate cuts, but that his plan would make the code simpler and fairer while also boosting economic growth.

Republicans will continue to push for major rate cuts as part of an overall tax reform, said Norquist. He noted that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the likely next chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, wants to change Congress’s budgeting rules in a way that will make that easier.

“The fact is Camp is the only guy who likes the Camp bill,” said Norquist.

Democrats have noticed the change.

“I haven’t heard that from them in a while,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who said his challenger this year rarely mentions cutting taxes. Said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.): “There’s been a big shift.”