Historians on the tax fight: “This was manufactured urgency”

Republicans are pushing a tax bill through Congress as though we were in the midst of a national emergency. Except we’re not.

Four historians with tax expertise say the rush on Capitol Hill to make such huge changes to the tax code is unprecedented. Congress has moved quickly on taxes and spending in the past, but it’s been in moments of national emergency — when the United States was fighting in the first and second world wars, for example, or when the economy was teetering on the brink of collapse at the end of the George W. Bush administration. 

“In that sense, it’s really unprecedented,” said Ajay Mehrotra, a law professor at Northwestern University and president of the American Bar Foundation, pointing to the hasty, sloppy process adopted despite the lack of any sort of national emergency necessitating it.