Some of us are old enough to remember 1986. It was the year that President Reagan passed a tax reform plan. Someday, some one will look back to 2017 as the year that President Trump passed his tax reform.
What’s the difference between 1986 and 2017? The answer is Democrats.
In 1986, Democrats were happy to support it, as we see in this post from Rachel del Guidice:
More than 30 Senate Democrats voted for President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 — including one still in office today — and conservatives say Democrats today have no reason to vote against a similar tax reform package now before Congress.
“If I hear any more Democrats talking about ‘the bottom rate is going up,’ I’ll remind them they might want to contact [Joe Biden, Al Gore, and John Kerry], because they voted with President [Ronald] Reagan to lower that 11 percent rate to zero, just as we are lowering the 10 percent rate to zero as well,” Rep. Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said at a recent event at The Heritage Foundation.
Only three Democratic senators voted against the Republican tax reform plan when it passed the Senate on Jun 24, 1986, and only 12 Democrats voted against the final conference report when it passed the Senate on Sept. 27, 1986, before the legislation was signed into law by Reagan on Oct. 22, 1986.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who has represented Vermont in the Senate since 1975, also voted for Reagan’s tax-reform package, as did then-Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who retired from the Senate in 2014.
So what happened? The answer is that this a very different Democrat Party.
In 1986, we had Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a Texas Democrat who wouldn’t recognize what the left has done to his party. Wonder what the late Senator Bentsen would have said about his party nominating a woman for governor whose ladder to fame was promoting abortion?
In fact, Senator Bentsen was the last Texas Democrat to win a Senate election when he was re-elected to the U.S. Senate in 1988. (It was the same year that he was the VP candidate with Governor Dukakis.)
Anne Richards did win the governor’s race in 1990 but that was really a case of Clayton Williams blowing the election with some unfortunate remarks. Governor Richards was defeated in 1994 by then Rangers’ owner George W. Bush.
We still had “blue dog” Democrats in the House back in 1986. Most of them were wiped out in the 1994 mid-term election.
So what is different today? Again, the answer is that the Democrats have changed beyond recognition.
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