In one of the two big off-year political contests that will eventually transfix political junkies everywhere, GOP Attorney General Jerry Kilgore has formally launched his candidacy for governorship of the Commonwealth of Virginia, stumping around the state with an unlikely ally in tow: United States Senator John Warner, who has pretty much parted company with the gubernatorial candidate on the major issues facing Virginia in recent years.The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Jeff Schapiro referred to the Warner-Kilgore road show as a “Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis act,” a cultural reference that’s funny and apposite to us old folks who remember, however dimly, the 1950s show-biz partnership between the debonair Martin and the clownish Lewis (not then known, even in France, as a genius).”That Warner and Kilgore are coming together is evidence that the Republican Party is still coming apart, divided between the fading moderate bloc embodied by Warner and the dominant right wing that birthed Kilgore,” Schapiro wrote.The GOP unity signs in Virginia are very deceptive. Schapirto put it well:”How does [Kilgore] simultaneously satisfy the anti-taxers who control the GOP and also the Main Street-type Republicans, like Senator Warner, who will support a tax increase as an investment in essential services?”The no-new-tax forces, notably the Grover G. Norquist-led Americans for Tax Reform, are furious that Kilgore has pledged to support for renomination House and Senate Republicans who backed additional taxes for education, human services and public safety.”And moderate Republicans worry that the state’s finances will bleed again if Kilgore has his way on transportation. He wants to divert sales and income tax revenue that finances schools, police and programs for the poor to roads, rather than rely on higher fuel taxes and other fees on motorists.”So far as I know, Virginia Democrats are completely united behind the candidacy of Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine. But Kilgore, aside from the challenge of uniting his own partisans, is having to deal with an independent candidacy from Republican state senator Russell Potts of Winchester.Everything I know about Jerry Kilgore suggests to me that he’s not exactly the kind of deft politician who can herd sheep, much less cats. And indeed, the most common definition of the original Scotch-Irish meaning of the surname I share with him is: “Tender of goats.” That’s a pretty good description of the Attorney General’s leadership position in the Virginia GOP.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 25: Democrats Dodge Bullet As Trump Kills Higher Income Tax on the Wealthy
Sometimes dogs that don’t bark are very significant, and I noted one at New York:
Republicans have both an arithmetic and a messaging problem as they try to enact Donald Trump’s second-term agenda via a giant budget-reconciliation bill. The former involves finding a way to pay for the $4 trillion-plus tax cuts Trump has demanded, along with a half-trillion or so in border security and defense spending increases. And the latter flows from the necessity of hammering popular federal programs (especially Medicaid) to avoid boosting budget deficits that are already out of control from the perspective of conservatives. This sets up Democrats nicely to deplore the whole mess as a matter of “cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for Trump’s billionaire friends,” a very effective message that has vulnerable House Republicans worried.
To interrupt this line of attack while making the overall agenda slightly more affordable, anonymous White House sources lofted a trial balloon earlier this month via a Fox News report:
“White House aides are quietly floating a proposal within the House GOP that would raise the tax rate for people making more than $1 million to 40%, two sources familiar with discussions told Fox News Digital, to offset the cost of eliminating taxes on overtime pay, tipped wages, and retirees’ Social Security.
“The sources stressed the discussions were only preliminary, and the plan is one of many being talked about as congressional Republicans work on advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process.
“Trump and his White House have not yet taken a position on the matter, but the idea is being looked at by his aides and staff on Capitol Hill.”
The idea wasn’t as shocking as it might seem. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts reduced the top income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, so just letting that provision expire would accomplish the near-40 percent rate without disturbing other goodies for rich people in the 2017 bill like corporate-tax cuts, estate-tax cuts, and a relaxed alternative minimum tax for both individuals and corporations. One House Republican, Pennsylvania’s Dan Meuser, suggested resetting the top individual tax rate at 38.6 percent, still a reduction from pre-2017 levels but a “tax increase on the rich” as compared to current policies.
Crafty as this approach might have been as a way of boosting claims that Trump had aligned the GOP with middle-class voters (the intended beneficiaries of his recent tax-cut proposals) rather than the very rich, the idea of backing any tax increase on the allegedly super-productive job creators at the top of the economic pyramid struck many Republicans as the worst imaginable heresy. You could plausibly argue that total opposition to higher taxes, or even to progressive taxes, was the holy grail for the party, more foundational than any other principle and one of the remaining links between pre-Trump and MAGA conservatism. At the very idea of fuzzing up the tax-cut gospel, old GOP warhorses like Newt Gingrich and Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist arose from their political rest homes to shout: unclean! Gingrich called it the worst potential betrayal of the Cause since George H.W. Bush cut a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal in 1990 that included a tax increase.
As it happens, it was all a mirage. In virtual unison, both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have said a high-end tax cut won’t happen this year, as Politico reports:
“President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday came out against a tax hike on the wealthiest Americans — likely putting the nail in the coffin of the idea.
“Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he thought the idea would be ‘very disruptive’ because it would prompt wealthy people to leave the country. …
“Johnson separately knocked the idea earlier in the day, saying that he is ‘not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally.’”
Trump’s real fear may be that wealthy people would leave the GOP rather than the country. Many are already upset about Trump’s 19th-century protectionist tariff agenda and its effects on the investor class. Subordinating the tax-cut gospel to other MAGA goals might push some of them over the edge. As for Johnson, the Speaker is having to cope with the eternal grumbling of the House Freedom Caucus, where domestic budget cuts are considered a delightful thing in itself and the idea of boosting anyone’s taxes to succor the parasites receiving Medicaid benefits is horrifying.
If Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill runs into trouble or if Democrats set the table for a big midterm comeback wielding the “cutting Medicaid to give billionaires a tax break” message, squashing the symbolic gesture of a small boost in federal income-tax rates for the wealthy may be viewed in retrospect as a lost opportunity for the GOP. For the time being, that party’s bond with America’s oligarchs and their would-be imitators stands intact.