Grover Norquist: Repatriation holiday could happen

Norquist’s comments come as the Win America Campaign, a coalition of businesses and business groups, is lobbying for a holiday, which they say will help bring in some of the roughly $1 trillion U.S. corporations have parked overseas. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House majority leader, is among the lawmakers who have backed the idea as well.  

For their part, critics of the last tax holiday, which was enacted in 2004 and allowed multinationals to bring offshore revenues here at the reduced rate of 5.25 percent, have expressed skepticism that it helped create jobs. The current top marginal corporate rate is 35 percent. 

At the news conference, planned for just ahead of the tax filing deadline, prominent congressional Republicans — including Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee — also resumed their sharp criticism of Obama’s Wednesday deficit-reduction speech. 

The GOP lawmakers continued to slam Obama for calling for allowing taxes to rise on the wealthy, and called for the president to move beyond rhetoric when it comes to tax reform. 

On Wednesday, Obama called for congressional action on individual tax reform, after the administration had earlier made quite clear it was pushing forward on revamping the corporate tax code. Still, the aftermath of Wednesday’s speech showed that the two parties appear to have a gap to bridge when it comes to tax reform, even though top Republicans have also endorsed the idea. 

“I always appreciate the speeches on tax reform. But speeches won’t get it done,” said Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee. “We don’t need any more commissions. We don’t need any more remarks. We need the president to come to the Capitol and sit down with our Republican leaders to get serious about fashioning a tax code that is fair for people and competitive for our companies around the world.”