Schadenfreude: Saturnalia 2017 Edition Phase One

Because I get the feeling there's going to be more than one nasty laugh to be had at Republicans' expense before this month is over.

I mentioned earlier in my rage against the Senate Tax Scam bill that the final product was so rushed that opponents could file court orders to dismiss the whole thing just on bad grammar alone. Now it turns out (via Slate.com) that the proposed Senate bill would choke the hell out of some of their deep-pocket corporate overlords:

When Mitch McConnell & co. revived the AMT, they absentmindedly left it at its current rate of 20 percent, the same as the new, lower rate of the corporate income tax that the bill included. As a result, many companies won’t be able to use tax breaks that were supposed to be preserved in the legislation, including the extremely popular credit for research and development costs. Corporate accountants started freaking out about this over the weekend, but the situation reached high farce when a group of lawyers from Davis Polk pointed out that, by leaving the AMT intact, Republicans had essentially undermined their bill’s most important changes to the international tax code...

Keeping the AMT was supposed to raise $40 billion, but that already appears to be a gross underestimate... NYU Law professor and tax expert Lily Batchelder concludes that the AMT will actually cost companies at least $329 billion—good for limiting the blow to the deficit, bad for the corporations who are supposed to be stumping for this legislative Frankenstein—just based on the value of the R&D credits and international exemptions that have been rendered useless...

Ahem. BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAAHAAHAHAHHHAHAHAAHAHA

When I talked to Batchelder briefly on the phone Tuesday night, she pointed out that while the GOP’s AMT debacle would end up raising more money than expected, there are almost certainly other, undiscovered mistakes in the bill that would lose revenue. “I think this evidences what can go wrong when you try to pass massive tax reform this quickly,” she said.

Reason No.98301940305 why this Republican-led Congress is the WORST EVER. They can't even pass their keystone legislation without shooting themselves in the collective foot.

And Republicans have only themselves to blame. If this HAD BEEN an OPEN and HONEST process, with committee reviews and floor debates, a lot of the loopholes and gaps would have been spotted and filled. If this had been a bipartisan effort with Democrats, at least the Democrats would have spotted errors and corrected them because the Dems are SERIOUS about effective government.

Instead, the Republicans kept it all under wraps because they knew the public would recoil from a lot of the things they wanted to pass. Instead, the Republicans didn't care enough to get the details rights because they have never been about actual effective governance.

This is why the House CANNOT simply pass the Senate bill and ship it to trump for signing, because their financiers running the SuperPACs they need to win elections are going to get hurt by this faux pas. The two houses of Congress are going to have to send the respective tax cut bills to the Conference process to iron out the differences.

This means it's not over. CALL CONGRESS. CALL BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE.

It's likely the Republicans will ignore you and pass a godawful tax cut bill no matter what. But they need to know that what they're passing will piss off MILLIONS of Americans. They need to know 2018 Midterms are going to be brutal for them and they are going to have to answer to US for their folly.