Denouncing the Republican's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as lopsided partisanship, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said it was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky. – not President Donald Trump – who cut out the Democrats.
"I wanted to be more involved," Sen. Manchin, a moderate, told NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday's "Meet the Press."
"I really believed that the president wanted to work in a bipartisan way. . . . This is not a reform. This is a tax cut."
Manchin said he went to the White House to work with the president on getting Democrats on board as former President Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, but in the end McConnell killed reform to pass partisan tax cuts.
"I gave them a whole litany of things that I thought 10 or more Democrats would vote for, to have it 60 or 65 votes," Manchin told Todd. "I really believe it was possible, if you had regular order.
"Once Mitch McConnell decided that 51 votes was all that was needed, and they're all going to be Republicans and make it political, that's exactly what happened."
With a narrow 52-48 majority in the Senate and on the heels of failed repeal of Obamacare with that slim margin, McConnell instead worked a "budget gimmick" to ensure something that will pass, Manchin said.
"Mitch McConnell basically told the president, we can do this under a budget reconciliation, which is a budget gimmick," Manchin told Told. "He passed a budget with $500 billion of deficit going in. So, he had $1.5 trillion of deficit to work with and giveaways, tax cuts and everything else, rather than revenue-neutral, which is what Ronald Reagan did . . . which is what I wanted to do – and many Republicans kind of wanted to do, I thought – but that's not what we ended up with.
"And Chuck, the only thing about it, when you look in '86, Ronald Reagan did it and did it in a way that everyone was involved and got bipartisan support."
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