WASHINGTON -- Republicans used a burst of eleventh-hour horse-trading Friday to edge a $1.4 trillion tax bill to the brink of Senate passage, as a party starved all year for a major legislative triumph took a giant step toward giving President Donald Trump one of his top priorities by Christmas.
"We have the votes," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared after leaders swayed holdout senators by agreeing to fatten tax breaks for millions of businesses and let people deduct local property taxes.
Party leaders hoped for Senate approval later Friday on a measure that focuses the bulk of its tax reductions on businesses and higher-earning individuals, gives more modest breaks to others and would be the boldest rewrite of the nation's tax system since 1986. Debate stretched into the evening as lawmakers waited for Republicans to unveil the final version of their measure.
Republicans touted the package as one that would benefit people of all incomes and ignite the economy. Even an official projection of a $1 trillion, 10-year flood of deeper budget deficits couldn't dissuade nearly all GOP senators from rallying behind the bill.
"Obviously I'm kind of a dinosaur on the fiscal issues," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the only announced GOP opponent, who battled to keep the measure from worsening the government's accumulated $20 trillion in IOUs.
The Republican-led House approved a similar bill last month in what has been a stunningly swift trip through Congress for legislation that impacts the breadth of American society and is hundreds of pages long.
Democrats derided the bill as a GOP gift to its wealthy and business backers at the expense of lower-earning people. They contrasted the bill's permanent reduction in corporate income tax rates from 35 percent to 20 percent to individual tax breaks that would end in 2026.
"Every time the choice is between corporations and families, the Republicans choose corporations," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Democrats took to the Senate floor and social media to mock what they said was a 479-page, amended version of the bill that included changes in barely legible handwriting. They also criticized Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., for a proposed amendment they said would give a tax break to only conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. Toomey, one of the chamber's more conservative members, acknowledged the language would help Hillsdale but said other schools might benefit, too.
The bill hit rough waters Thursday after the Joint Taxation panel concluded it would worsen federal shortfalls by $1 trillion over a decade, even when factoring in economic growth that lower taxes would stimulate.
Trump administration officials and many Republicans have insisted the bill would pay for itself by stimulating the economy. But the sour projections stiffened resistance from some deficit-averse Republicans.
But after bargaining that stretched into Friday morning, McConnell and other leaders said victory was assured in a chamber they control 52-48. Facing unyielding Democratic opposition, Republicans could lose no more than two GOP senators and prevail with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence.
Under the changes leaders agreed to, millions of companies whose owners pay individual, not corporate, taxes on their profits would be allowed deductions of 23 percent, up from 17.4 percent. That helped win over GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Steve Daines of Montana.
Collins, a moderate and frequent maverick who opposed her party's Obamacare repeal drive, said she'd back the tax bill.
The changes added more than $300 billion to the tax bill's costs. To pay for that, leaders agreed to reduce the number of high-earners who must pay the alternative minimum tax, rather than completely erasing it.
They'd also increase a one-time tax on profits U.S.-based corporations are holding overseas and require firms to keep paying the business version of the alternative minimum tax.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. - who, like Corker, had been a holdout and has sharply attacked Trump's capabilities as president - said he'd back the bill. He said he'd received commitments from party leaders and the administration "to work with me" to restore protections, dismantled by Trump, for young immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children. That seemed short of a pledge to actually revive the safeguards.
Overall, the Senate bill would drop the highest personal income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 38.5 percent. The estate tax levied on a few thousand of the nation's largest inheritances would be narrowed to affect even fewer.
Deductions for state and local income taxes, moving expenses and other items would vanish, the standard deduction - used by most Americans - would nearly double to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples, and the per-child tax credit would grow.
It would also explicitly let parents buy tax-advantaged 529 college savings accounts for fetuses, a step they can already take but which anti-abortion forces hailed as a victory by inscribing that right into law.
As the Senate neared a momentous vote on the sweeping Republican tax bill, Senate Democrats mocked the nearly 500-page printed text of the legislation - complaining it was given to them at the last minute before the vote.
And it had illegible, hand-written notes in the margins, they protested.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted, "No, I haven't had time to read the 500-page #GOPTaxScam bill that we're voting on tonight," with a photo of her reading aloud from pages at her desk. "Couldn't read it if I tried - and I did."
Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said "one page literally has hand-scribbled policy changes on it that can't be read. This is Washington, D.C. at its worst. Montanans deserve so much better."
Republican leaders engaged in eleventh-hour negotiations with GOP holdout senators to meet their demands and secure their support for the bill that's a political imperative for Trump and the party. They had rounds of closed-door meetings and were drafting the revised bill text up to the time they assembled on the Senate floor in advance of the vote.
The $1.4 trillion bill focuses the bulk of its tax reductions on businesses and higher-earning individuals and gives more modest breaks to others. It would bring the first major overhaul of the U.S. tax system in three decades.
In 2010, Republicans argued that Democrats hadn't read the massive health care bill before voting for its passage.