Republicans Struggle To Overturn Senate Tax Vote

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, New York

06 April 2001

Following the US Senate's vote on Wednesday to trim the President's 10-year tax cutting plan to only $1.2 trillion, Republican leaders were yesterday trying desperately to reassemble the 50 Senate votes they need to re-establish their $1.6 trillion target. Although these votes are on the President's budget, not on substantive legislation, and the budget merely sets guidelines for spending and taxing decisions, the GOP would be starting behind the field if the lower figure remains in the budget resolution. "The budget is regarded as an exercise where each side is trying to feel each other out," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "When the rubber meets the road is in the tax bill and the appropriations bills."

Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said: "This is the beginning of a process. The president continues to believe that the budget that he proposed is the right budget for the country, and he is going to continue to press for it." Mr Bush said in front of a gathering of newspaper editors: "I urge the senators . . . to remember there's a lot of people in our country who are beginning to hurt."

The final debate on the budget takes place today. Under Senate procedural rules, the Republicans can call for a re-vote on the resolution, but are hesitating about doing so unless they are sure of victory - last night Republicans in the Senate seemed ready to concede that they did not have the votes to pass the full tax cut over 10 years.

Throughout yesterday, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, had been locked in discussions with wavering Republican senators, with most effort focused on James Jeffords, a long-serving Republican senator from Vermont, whose desire to secure a boost to money for special education programmes caused him to support the Democrat proposal that was voted through on Wednesday. But by night-time it seemed the battle was being lost.

Asked whether he thought he could persuade one of the two defecting Republican senators to toe the party line, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, said: "I've about run that string out. I think everybody feels like that's just not going to work."

If the lower figure remains in the Senate budget resolution, there has to be a joint Congressional conference to reconcile the competing versions of the resolution from House and Senate, but it's thought unlikely that the final resolution would incorporate the higher tax-cutting assumption embodied in the House's version of the resolution.

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