When Congress passed Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill into law on the 4th of July, GOP lawmakers celebrated its tax breaks for billionaires and deep cuts to America’s social safety net. But almost none of them celebrated the bill’s ten percent increase on gambling winnings. That may be because few, if any, of them even knew the measure was in the bill.
This surprising news was confirmed by the Huffington Post website after interviewing several GOP lawmakers about their vote on the bill.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) did seem to know that he voted for the measure, but was unsure of its origins. “If you’re asking me how it got in there, no, I don’t know,” he told reporters.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) copped to total ignorance of the tax hike saying, “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not sure what it does.”
Senators Grassley and Cornyn might be expected to know about the new tax since they were both on the Senate Finance Committee, which crafted that specific addition to the bill.
At least one member of the Committee, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said he knew about the tax hike, but thought it was a bad policy. “I was so focused on Medicaid, I wasn’t looking for other reasons to be against the bill. But that would be another one.” Tillis, it should be noted, was one of three GOP Senators to vote against the bill.
Opponents of the gambling tax included Congresswoman Diane Titus (D-Nevada) who said, “It pushes people into the black market if they don’t do regulated gaming because they have a tax disadvantage.”