House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dodged some questions Thursday on whether she would tell Democrats to vote for making middle class tax cuts in the GOP tax reform bill permanent.
The moderator referenced Republicans planning a vote to make the middle class tax cuts permanent, asking “are you going to tell Democrats for or against doing that?”
Rather than responding directly, Pelosi bashed Republicans for not making the tax cuts permanent in the first place.
“Well you see, here’s what this is since we’re having a budget meeting,” Pelosi began. “The reason they didn’t make them permanent in the first place was because they were operating under reconciliation and under reconciliation they could only have so much addition to the debt.”
“So that’s why in their priorities, they chose corporate America over middle class families, because they couldn’t do both,” she continued.
“Maybe they just have something about the middle class that they weren’t going to give them a good deal but nonetheless they didn’t have the ability to do so,” she mused.
“How will Democrats vote on that?” the moderator followed up on extending the middle class tax cuts.
“With all due respect, you never know what they’re going to do,” Pelosi replied of Republicans, saying “I’m not going to be here talking about things that they may or may not do because we just don’t know.”
These remarks come less than a week after Pelosi admitted it was “accurate” that she wanted to raise taxes by rolling back the Republican tax cuts.
Prior to that, Pelosi has repeatedly dismissed bonuses resulting from tax reform as “crumbs.”