Democrats have been more than happy to hammer their Republican counterparts with this fact, placing them in the same policy camp as Trump. A vote on the provision was one of the many concessions that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made to secure his job in January, even as he has said that he doesn’t support the measure. But amusingly enough, the fair tax is still being supported by many of the pro-MAGA members remaining in the House.
If the main defense from DeSantis’ team is “Well, you supported it, too,” that doesn’t exactly signal that he still believes it’s a good idea. Looking at the co-sponsor list of the Fair Tax Act is like taking a peek at the members who would become the biggest supporters of the MAGA movement in Congress, among them several who would later go on to serve in the Trump administration: Mike Pompeo, who declined his own run at the White House in April, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
In a pre-Trump world, that was absolutely the kind of nutty tax policy that was the provenance of the Freedom Caucus and members of the tea party movement. The Fair Tax Act of 2015, which DeSantis co-sponsored, would have levied that 23% sales tax as a replacement for “the current income and corporate income tax, employment and self-employment taxes, and estate and gift taxes.” The bill also would have blocked all funding to the IRS after 2019 and, weirdly enough, canceled itself if the 16th Amendment, which first authorized an income tax, wasn’t repealed within seven years of the bill becoming law.
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