ROUND 2: Senate Republicans will release their own tax bill on Thursday with big changes from the House version
- The Senate Republican tax bill is expected to be released on Thursday.
- The bill will likely have key differences from the House version of the bill.
Congressional Republicans are set to release another massive tax bill later this week.
The Senate Finance Committee is expected to roll out its version of a proposed tax code overhaul on Thursday, according to the chair of the committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, and other Republican leaders.
The bill comes as the House debate their own version of a tax overhaul, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The TCJA is currently working its way through the House Ways and Means Committee and GOP leaders want a full vote on the House floor next week.
The Senate has a similarly aggressive timeline and is hoping to pass the bill quickly to get a finalized tax bill to President Donald Trump's desk by Christmas.
There also could be substantial differences between the House and Senate bills that would need to be worked out in order for an overhaul to pass through both chambers of Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters Tuesday that the Senate bill would be revenue neutral and not cause a large projected increase in the federal deficit. This would be a substantial change from the House bill, which most analyses show would add a large amount to the deficit.
Other provisions that showed up in the House bill could be vastly edited or dropped altogether in the Senate version.
For instance, reports indicate that the Senate could do away with the entire state and local tax deduction, a hotly debated issue in the House. Since Republicans hold no Senate seats in areas where the deduction is popular, like New York and California, there is no political calculus in keeping the deduction in its legislation.
And according to The Washington Post, perhaps the largest change would be a one-year delay in the cut of the corporate tax rate to 20% from the current 35%. This could be designed to save money in order for the bill to qualify under Senate rules.
Another massive change, according to the Post, would be preserving seven indiviudal income tax brackets - rather than reducing brackets to just four, which the House bill calls for.