A Manchin down under

EYES EMOJI: As Republicans in both the House and Senate took baby steps this week toward enacting Trump’s domestic agenda — most notably a $4.5 trillion extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that the business community has been salivating over for for more than a year now — a key voice from an increasingly influential wing of the GOP is imploring lawmakers once again to proceed with another round of tax cuts at their own peril, and lampooning conservative groups lining up to put the squeeze on members.

— “If Republicans spend the next year fighting over a tax bill that is a low priority outside the Beltway, they will stall the more promising elements of the Trump agenda and expose themselves as badly disconnected from the interests of the working class that put them in power,” Oren Cass, the chief economist for the JD Vance-aligned think tank American Compass, argued in an op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday.

— Cass’ populist position — that Republicans shouldn’t fritter away their political capital on tax cuts, especially when there’s support for hiking taxes on corporations and the wealthy to reduce the deficit rather than slashing spending — isn’t new. But it’s more notable now that one of his ideological adherents now occupies the vice presidency, and with budget hawks already flexing considerable power over the reconciliation push.

— In the process, Cass also excoriated anti-tax groups like the Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform and Americans for Prosperity, which have pledged to drop tens of millions of dollars this year in support of what Cass views as “their mission to cut taxes continuously, regardless of what most voters prioritize or the federal budget can bear.”

— Cass dug the knife in further, accusing conservative ideologues of “preach[ing] tax cuts with the same desperate zeal as climate activists demanding a near-total elimination of carbon emissions” or “open-borders advocates oppose any effort to restrict immigration.”

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