Just yesterday I observed that congressional Republican leaders have mostly ignored Trump's demands on taxes, but it looks like they will give in to Trump's demands and adopt Rand Paul's amendment to repeal the individual mandate included in Obamacare.
“We’re optimistic that inserting the individual mandate repeal would be helpful, and that’s obviously the view of the Senate Finance Committee Republicans as well,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters, indicating that the policy could be inserted during the committee markup process as early as this week.
The office of Sen. John Thune (R-SD), a member of the Senate leadership team, confirmed to TPM that the final Senate tax bill would include the mandate’s repeal.
Now, they aren't necessarily doing this to please Trump so you might say they aren't really giving in to his demands.
The truth is their tax cut bill is financially under water and it probably can't survive the reconciliation process they've chosen which will only allow for up to $1.5 trillion in deficit spending.
Repealing the individual mandate is their Hail Mary pass to rescue their tax cuts as repealing the mandate will afford them more revenue to work with. The fact that it will also result in over 13 million people losing their coverage is beside the point for them. These are just numbers on a spreadsheet for congressional Republicans.
I honestly did not believe they would do this because it appeared as if they were well on their way to passing a bill without it. Why step on their own dicks at the final hour by attaching it to the partial repeal of Obamacare?
They've made a choice to consider every possible tax hike on the middle class before ever considering cutting taxes for the rich just slightly less.