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What Will It Take for the GOP to Pass Its Terrible Tax Bill?

George Zornick on Senate politics, Joan Walsh on sexual harassment in Washington, and Rick Perlstein on Republicans against Trump.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

November 30, 2017

Donald Trump holds sample tax forms as he promotes the Republican tax plan.(Reuters / Carlos Barria)

What will it take for Republicans to pass “the biggest tax scam in history” (Paul Krugman’s phrase)? George Zornick reports on the obstacles the GOP is facing in the Senate, and the pressure its members are feeling from donors. Still to come, if the bill passes the Senate: problems in the House, where the Tea Party Republicans may be more serious about the deficit and the debt.

Plus: sexual harassment in Washington—we’ve learned a lot about that in the last week, and about the way Congress deals with complaints against its members. The procedures have been called “flawed.” Joan Walsh comments, starting with the different cases of John Conyers and Al Franken.

Also: Republicans who have stood up to Trump—like Jeff Flake and John McCain—seem like truth-telling heroes to a lot of liberals; but not to Rick Perlstein. The author of the classic political history Nixonland talks about the trouble with anti-Trump Republicans.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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