Citizens and Celebrities Are Speaking Out Against the Disastrous Republican Senate Tax Bill

In the early hours of the morning Saturday, the Senate voted 51-49 to pass the Republican-pushed tax reform package, which looks like another piece of legislation under Trump that will harm marginalized groups, the middle class, and women.

The bill itself was shown in a video that Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester tweeted to have handwritten modifications in the margins, and multiple senators reported receiving the bill - which was reportedly 479 pages long - less than an hour before the scheduled vote with no time to read through it, let alone study it thoroughly.

The specifics of the bill don't look much better than the manner in which it was crafted and voted on. Corporation owners and corporate tax payers will see their tax rate reduced substantially - from 35% to 20%. However, a report by the Joint Committee on Taxation finds that taxes will be slightly raised for most individuals. And though the Committee predicts that this will be slightly offset by broad cuts at all individual taxpayer levels, those cuts will expire in 2025.

Tax bracket thresholds have been modified - with a single person earning less than $38,700 paying a rate of 12% instead of the current 15%, and those making $500,000 and above seeing a tax rate decrease of 4.6%. The bill however also removes some of the tax exemptions that people rely on - like itemized deductions for the self-employed. It also includes a repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate.

The bill, which sparked the #TaxScamBill to start trending on Twitter on Saturday morning, still has to be passed in the House. The version going to the House is also slightly different from the Senate's, and includes an irrelevant anti-abortion provision that would sneakily define unborn fetuses as people. The bill also authorizes drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Several celebrities have spoken out against the bill:

We can do this, everyone. We can defeat it in the House. We can stop the #TaxScamBill. This one's gonna be hard but it'll freak out the GOP when we pull it off. You in? https://t.co/4VQ6iXhkah
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) December 2, 2017

Citizens have also been protesting the bill as well:

There's still time to call your reps before the bill goes to the House, and if you don't like what you're seeing from the government, be sure to register to vote before the 2018 election season.

Image via Twitter