It took us 18 tries to find a GOP congressman who could tell us the individual income tax brackets.
House Republicans swear they had enough time to review a 500-page conference report released last Friday night before they voted on what they thought would be the final tax bill Tuesday. (They actually had to vote on the bill again Wednesday because of a parliamentary mishap.) But when we asked GOP lawmakers supporting the legislation this week for just one basic detail of the bill ― the tax bracket percentages for individual income ― hardly anyone could list them.
HuffPost had to ask 18 House Republicans to identify the tax brackets before we finally came across one member who could: Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah. (We stopped asking after Stewart, meaning the percentage of the House GOP conference who knew this key aspect of the bill could have been much worse than our imperfect survey suggests.)
To be clear, we were just looking for seven figures: 10 percent, 12 percent, 22 percent, 24 percent, 32 percent, 35 percent and 37 percent. We were not looking for congressional representatives to display some savant-like ability and provide the income thresholds for each bracket. We just wanted to see if Republicans knew this one simple element of a bill they were rushing into law.
They didn’t.
Among the GOP lawmakers who were shaky on those specifics were members of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, the chairwoman of the House Budget Committee (Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee) and the lead author of the bill in the House (Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady of Texas).
