Former chair of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean said the GOP would be "nailed with corruption" as a result of the recently passed tax bill, pointing out that more than a dozen Republican lawmakers stand to personally benefit from the new legislation.
"The Republican Party is going to get nailed with corruption because of the tax bill," Dean said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Thursday.
"14 senators — Republican senators who voted for that tax bill — are making $1 million or more, sometimes up to $10 million off of a provision that was slipped in at the last minute by [Sen.] Orrin Hatch [R-Utah]," Dean noted.
"You cannot be voting to line your own pockets, people don't like that, I don't care what party you're in," he said. "So they're [Republicans] going to really have a headwind."
Dean was referencing the provision Hatch added during the last-minute scramble to finalize the plan. It was reported that Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who at the time was still on the fence about voting for the bill, would be one of the lawmakers who would personally benefit. It was then reported that about 15 other GOP lawmakers, and President Donald Trump, would personally benefit from the provision due to tax cuts "for 'pass-through' businesses, like partnerships and LLCs, to real estate investors," according to Vox.
The major push to tilt the GOP tax legislation from resembling Trump's promised populist vision was led by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who has taken substantial contributions from the Koch brothers. Toomey worked for months and drew up plans to slash the individual tax rate, as well as the corporate tax rate and the repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate, in order to pass a bill that significantly favors the nation's wealthiest. The Washington Post elaborated:
For months, top Republicans leaders had been promising a “revenue-neutral” tax bill — one that, broadly speaking, would pay for the rate cuts by closing loopholes and eliminating certain deductions. But the scales of Toomey’s handout tilted sharply toward the cuts. The gap added up to more than $2 trillion over a decade.
Toomey’s message was simple: Revenue-neutral tax restructuring was not going to work.
His lobbying paid off. Shortly after Labor Day, Republican members of the Senate Budget Committee met inside the offices of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and concluded that they could support a tax bill that would add to the deficit.
"Let’s face it, he was central," Corker said, according to the Post. "This would be, I’m sure, the ultimate thing for him to accomplish here in United States Senate, and so he stayed focused."
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