Politics & Power Quote by Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush’s line is a small, well-cut blade: it doesn’t argue policy so much as it questions sincerity. “Apparently” does most of the work, signaling that this new enthusiasm for tax cuts is less conviction than sudden, suspicious discovery. He’s not engaging a Democratic case for tax relief; he’s implying it doesn’t exist until the polling does.

The sentence is engineered to frame tax cuts as Republican home turf and Democrats as fair-weather converts. By singling out “leaders in the Senate” who are “running for office,” Bush pins the motive squarely on ambition. The subtext is blunt: if they believed in it, they’d have believed in it when it was unpopular, when it threatened a primary, when donors weren’t nudging, when the base wasn’t demanding a price-of-living gesture. Instead, he suggests, they’ve stumbled into enlightenment right on schedule: election season.

It’s also a preemptive strike against bipartisan momentum. If Democrats adopt a tax-cut message, Republicans lose an easy contrast. Bush’s move is to poison the borrowing: any Democratic tax-cut proposal becomes “pandering” before it’s even scored by the CBO. That frees him from debating the details (who benefits, how it’s paid for) and keeps the fight on character and credibility, where campaign rhetoric is cheaper than arithmetic.

Contextually, it’s classic partisan gatekeeping in an era when “tax cuts” functions as both policy and identity badge. Bush is policing the badge.