Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), both of which said they would vote on the tax bill, have both come out as a yes for the bill only a hours before its scheduled to come out.
The GOP now has zero senators declaring a no on the vote, but there are still a few undecided.
The GOP isn’t out of danger quite yet. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) remain undecided. If they decide to vote no then Vice President Mike Pence will cast his vote to break the tie.
Yesterday I blogged that Rubio was going to vote no on the tax bill since he wanted to expand the child tax credit. The new tax bill has the child tax credit at $2,000, but a maximum of $1,100 is refundable Rubio and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) want it set at $3,000. As I said before, right now, it’s for those who make at least $3,000 a year. Rubio and Lee want to include those “who pay payroll taxes but do not earn enough to pay income taxes to claim the expanded credit.” This change “would expand the credit by $80 billion over 10 years, a smaller change than they proposed for the Senate bill.”
The leadership changed the bill to increase the refundable portion up $1,400, which was enough to change Rubio’s mind.
Corker has been a defiant voice throughout this process and didn’t even vote for the Senate tax bill. He had concerns about the deficit and up until today said he wouldn’t change his mind.
Well….he did. From Politico:
Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the only GOP senator to vote against the Senate’s tax legislation, announced on Friday that he would support the tax compromise that was finalized this week.“This bill is far from perfect, and left to my own accord, we would have reached bipartisan consensus on legislation that avoided any chance of adding to the deficit and far less would have been done on the individual side with items that do not generate economic growth,” Corker said in a statement. “But after great thought and consideration, I believe that this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make U.S. businesses domestically more productive and internationally more competitive is one we should not miss.”
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