December 2017.

     Foiled by the Grey Lady again.  Drat.  The Republicans engaged in procedurally dubious, middle-of-the-night ramming through of their 2017 tax bill.  Political hypocrisy is undying.  Bush the Younger’s 2001 and 2003 tax giveaways cleared the Senate through reconciliation as did this turkey, yet the Republicans hyperventilated in 2009 when Mr. Obama availed himself of the process to enact the Affordable Care Act and the GOP cried foul again when Mr. Biden resorted to it for the American Rescue Plan.

     Anyway, the wee-hour shenanigans afforded another opportunity to hiss at the GOP’s Swiss Army Knife policy:  Tax cuts yesterday, tax cuts today, tax cuts forever!

Here’s the reporting by Jim Tankersley, Thomas Kaplan, and Alan Rappeport:

Jim Tankersley, Thomas Kaplan, and Alan Rappeport, “G.O.P. Scrambles to Push Tax Bill Through Senate,” The New York Times, 2 December 2017, A1, A12 (www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/senate-tax-bill.html).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

     Would that the GOP’s passage of “tax reform” under cover of darkness could be read as political farce, not as an act of stark political cynicism.  Nothing now obscures the GOP’s obeisance to plutocratic donors.  No one need any longer take the Republican Party’s claim of principled fiscal responsibility as anything beyond politically useful but empty Pablum.  How can Congress, as a coequal branch, blunt President Trump’s worst impulses when its majority party cannot restrain its own baser instincts and in fact tolerates Mr. Trump’s dangerous antics so that its donors can be satisfied?