Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport at NYT:
By midafternoon on Friday, Republicans had the votes to pass their tax bill in the Senate. What they did not have was a bill.
The legislation, covering nearly 500 pages, finally surfaced well after the sun had set. It appeared first in the lobbying shops of K Street, which sent back copies to some Democrats in the Senate, who took to social media to protest being asked to vote in a matter of hours on a bill that had yet to be shared with them directly.
The drafts that leaked to journalists included changes scrawled in looping handwriting in the margins. Democrats posted screenshots and accompanying complaints. Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, called it “Washington D.C. at its worst” in a video in which he held up a page of the bill with the changes.
“This is unbelievable, we’re doing massive tax reform on an absolute incredible timeline,” he said. “This is going to affect everybody in this country.”
Brandon Carter at The Hill:
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) appeared to publish its final analysis of the cost of the Senate GOP tax bill after the bill had already passed the upper chamber.
The JCT posted its analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on its official Twitter account at 2:56 a.m. on Saturday, an hour after the bill was voted on in the Senate.
The analysis shows that the bill will cost $1.45 trillion over the next 10 years, just under the maximum $1.5 trillion marker that allowed the bill to pass with just 50 votes.
Joint Committee estimates the revenue effects of a perfecting amendment to the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”, as reported by the Senate Committee on Finance.https://t.co/8MdIhoHRRE— JCT Congress (@jctgov) December 2, 2017
