Is Bipartisanship Dead?

Two important solutions might die on the vine, all to help Trump win.

Photo: Valerie Plesch for the New York Times

There are now two examples of bills that negotiators worked for months to achieve a bipartisan consensus, only to have them flounder because of election year politics.

We’re familiar with the first: the border bill. Senate negotiators finally reached agreement on a bill to curb migration and fund our overburdened immigration system. But Donald Trump told Republicans he doesn’t want a solution that will take away his biggest campaign talking point: the border crisis. Speaker Mike Johnson is not one to cross Trump, so the entire deal is officially “dead on arrival” in the House.

Now there’s a second bill, the Wyden-Smith tax bill out of the House of Representatives, that comprises a rare, bipartisan measure to lower taxes for businesses while restoring some of the Child Tax Credit. Respected leaders from both parties negotiated Wyden-Smith and urged their members to support it. And to everyone’s surprise, it actually passed the House by a large margin. 

But now some Republicans in the Senate are aiming to kill it. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said the quiet part out loud: “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good … means he could be reelected, and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.”

Let’s take a look at what Wyden-Smith offers, and then zoom out to the bigger question now on everyone’s mind: If, under the GOP’s approach, there can be no piece of legislation that might benefit the incumbent president, why even bother sending people to Congress to get things done? We’ll look at what Democrats did, by contrast, when Trump was in the White House, and at who is obstructing solutions and who is calling them out for it.

The tax bill, in brief

Wyden-Smith is named after its two main negotiators, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. The two represent the two top tax writers in Congress.

They proposed a package of tax breaks that amount to $78 billion in relief for both businesses and families with children, giving a little bit to the proponents of both. The proposed package expands the child tax credit, though not quite back to the more generous credits available during the pandemic. Specifically, it makes an inflation-adjusted $2,000–per-child credit more accessible to larger families with lots of kids, while raising caps on claimed credits for lower-income families. 

For businesses, the bill restores certain tax breaks on R&D and capital expenditures, allowing businesses to deduct them immediately rather than amortize them over a few years. Both would last through 2025. 

Finally, it also raises the low-income housing tax credit and extends tax benefits to disaster victims.

The measure is extremely popular by House standards. It passed the House by a whopping 357 to 70, with 47 Republicans and 23 Democrats voting against, for very different reasons: Far-right Republicans decried the child tax credit as discouraging work, while progressives said it didn’t go far enough and rewarded big corporations too much. But these were a small minority of objectors.

“The child tax credit reforms in this bill are pro-family policies that maintain the child tax credit structure of the Trump-era G.O.P. tax reform,” Rep. Smith said, without mentioning that the amount of the credits were much higher thanks to Democratic pressure. “The child tax credit provisions in this bill help families crushed by inflation, remove the penalty for families with multiple children and maintain work requirements.”

The bill’s other co-author struck an optimistic tone. Said Sen. Wyden in a statement:

Sixteen million kids from low-income families will be better off as a result of this plan, and given today’s miserable political climate, it’s a big deal to have this opportunity to pass pro-family policy that helps so many kids get ahead. At a time when so many people in Oregon and all across America are getting clobbered by rising rents and home prices, the improvements this plan makes to the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit will build more than 200,000 new affordable housing units. By incentivizing R&D, this plan is also going to promote innovation and help sharpen our economic competitiveness with China and the rest of the world. My goal remains to get this passed in time for families and businesses to benefit in this upcoming tax filing season, and I’m going to pull out all the stops to get that done.

An uncertain path

Wyden may have his work cut out for him given Republican objections. As an illustration of how tricky things might get, to bring the bill to the House floor in the first place, and around the objections of the far-right extremists there, Speaker Johnson had to deploy a special expedited procedure that required a two-thirds vote to circumvent the regular process.

In the Senate, senior Republican leaders like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have made it clear they don’t want to see the bill come up before the election. Grassley fretted that the image of Biden “cutting checks” for people might help lift him to victory in the election—even though the bill is a true tax credit and has no mechanism for direct check distribution. 

Indeed, the authors anticipated this attack. The House Ways and Means Committee issued a statement last week that the bill “explicitly prohibited” the Biden administration from “manipulating the bill’s tax relief in an attempt to send politically timed refund checks.”

And Sen. Michael Crapo (R-ID) is now raising concerns about the bill that he’s never had before, signaling an intent to delay its passage. For example, Crapo argued that a provision allowing parents to use last year’s earnings to claim a bigger credit would discourage work, and he wants to see that looked at and amended. But Crapo and other Republican senators previously voted for a tax credit structure that contained the exact same provision, indicating that Crapo is not acting in good faith with his “concerns.” 

Democrats supported solutions that might have helped Trump

When the country spiraled into crisis from shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration proposed a huge stimulus package to keep the economy afloat and keep people employed. Democrats voted unanimously for that package because the nation truly was in crisis. If they had concerns that the bill might be popular and help re-elect Trump, they didn’t voice them, nor did it stop any of them from voting for it.

Now there is a border crisis, according to Republicans, and Democrats have worked with Republicans to craft a compromise, one that is extremely unpalatable to progressives, immigrant rights groups, and civil rights organizations. Despite the bipartisan compromise, Republicans in the House are prepared to torpedo the bill, keeping the border crisis hanging over Biden’s head in a cynical ploy to maintain Trump’s main campaign talking point.

And when there is finally a hard-fought, bipartisan agreement to help families with kids and incentivize business capital investment and R&D, once again some Republicans are showing they care more about tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and winning elections than actually helping the American people.

Clarifying the political messaging

Not every Republican agrees with this gamesmanship at the expense of the American people and our allies. On the border, as I wrote about in an earlier piece, several Republicans in the Senate, including Sens. Lankford (R-OK), Cramer (R-ND) and Young (R-IN) have spoken out publicly against reserving a crisis until there’s a politically more useful time to solve it. 

The tax bill may stall out to serve Republicans’ political goal of re-electing Trump. If it does, it could become a second clear case for President Biden and the Democrats to show how Republicans ultimately don’t want any solutions, just problems to campaign on. The GOP is willing to place Trump’s reelection above the national interest, which underscores a larger theme that Trump is absolutely in this for himself and his own power, and not for ordinary Americans. 

Indeed, even on the “border crisis,” for which there is now a clear bipartisan solution, Trump apparently is willing to continue to allow all manner of people he claims are criminals, rapists, terrorists and murderers to enter the country, all so he can keep up his message that we are being “invaded.” 

Democrats may be able to successfully pin the failure to pass any real solutions on Trump and the GOP. If they can, this will mean only one of two things to voters in the center: Either the crisis was not as dire as Trump made it out to be, or he is okay with the country going to hell if it means he can win.

By ultimately rejecting real, bipartisan solutions, the GOP is steadily backing itself into this corner and effectively declaring bipartisanship dead. That won’t sit well in November with crucial swing voters who want real solutions to the crises they are being told are destroying us. It’s a loser of a position for the GOP, and it will be up to Democrats to capitalize on it.