Now It’s the Republicans Who Are Being Held Hostage by Fringe Groups

Opinion|Now It’s the Republicans Who Are Being Held Hostage by Fringe Groups

We’re not even a month into Donald Trump’s new term and already, a cadre of Republican activists appears poised to fritter away his popularity and derail his administration’s agenda with a maximalist demand for a budget-busting tax cut. The Club for Growth, a free-enterprise advocacy group, says sustaining the big tax cut that President Trump signed into law during his first term must be Congress’s “top priority” because it “delivered record economic growth.”

That’s not true. Economic growth was lower in the year after the law’s passage than the year before. The two-year stretch that followed its passage saw slower growth than any other two-year period of the economic expansions in the 1990s and 2000s — not the kind of record anyone should be boasting about.

As a political matter, tax cuts simply are not a top priority for the American people broadly, the working class that now forms the core of the Republican coalition nor even the Republican Party itself. In a mid-January survey by Fox News, a grand total of 1 percent of voters said tax reform should now be President Trump’s top priority. A survey last year by my organization, American Compass, found that to lower the deficit, most working-class voters would want to see Congress raise taxes on corporations and on households with income about $250,000 before cutting spending. Even among Republicans, three-quarters of respondents believed that tax increases should be a part of any budget solution.

Most of that enormous tax cut from Mr. Trump’s first term is scheduled to expire this year. With the federal budget deficit much larger than it was eight years ago, genuine fiscal conservatives within the party oppose simply extending the cut for eight to 10 more years. But the anti-tax activists insist it’s the only way forward.

Special-interest pressure campaigns have been associated in recent years with “the groups,” as they are often called, activists that have pushed the Democratic Party far to the left of the typical voter on issues such as immigration, race, gender identity and climate change. But the Republican Party has its own special-interest groups — mirror images of the progressive ones, equally destructive of both its popularity and its prospects for getting anything done.

Alongside the Club for Growth, such groups as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Koch Network’s Americans for Prosperity have made it their mission to cut taxes continuously, regardless of what most voters prioritize or the federal budget can bear.