Jim Vandehei of Axios Media asked Sen. Chris Van Hollen where Democrats could work with Trump.
"Are there any components of tax reform he's talking about that Democrats would actually vote for, knowing no matter what you're going to say about that, there's going to be so much pressure on all of you guys to never give him a win?" he said.
"We just actually sent a letter to Mitch McConnell, we meaning the Democrats in the Senate, saying we were happy to work with him on genuine tax reform," Van Hollen said.
"We're not interested in providing another round of windfall tax breaks to very, very wealthy people. We don't think that's the priority in the country. but we asked them to follow Senator McCain's advice: let's work through the regular order, have hearings when it comes to tax reform, and we also are very concerned that they're going to blow a hole in the deficit and debt as we saw in the early 2000s was that 'trickledown' didn't work.
"We had the Bush tax cuts. They spiked the deficit way up. They didn't do anything for regular working people. So there are things we can do to simplify our tax code. I mean, there's a lot of junk in there that was put in there by people who were able to hire powerful special interest lobbyists.
"We need to clean a lot of that stuff out. But we're not interested in a exercise that's just a backdoor effort to provide tax breaks to very wealthy people. Kind of like the health care bill, which cut health care benefits to tens of millions of Americans in order to provide big tax breaks to very wealthy."
So Dems aren't bending. Good.
