Politics & Power Quote by Chris Van Hollen

“Very reasonable” is doing heavy lifting here: it’s not just a policy claim, it’s a preemptive rebuttal to the reflexive “tax grab” framing that haunts any talk of estates. Chris Van Hollen’s line is built like a courtroom argument aimed at the political middle, where tone often matters as much as math. By anchoring the estate tax in plain, almost domestic fairness language (“pay their share”), he treats extreme inherited wealth as a civic obligation problem, not a culture-war trophy.

The Teddy Roosevelt reference is the real move. Van Hollen isn’t citing history for trivia; he’s trying to repossess the idea of taxation as a conservative tradition, or at least not an alien one. TR, a Republican icon of “Square Deal” reform and trust-busting swagger, functions as a permission slip for uneasy moderates and a taunt to today’s GOP: if a Republican president could endorse asking big estates to contribute, what exactly happened to the party’s self-image?

The subtext is coalition management. Democrats need revenue and inequality rhetoric, but they also need to sound non-radical in an era where “socialism” is used as a bludgeon. By pointing to a century-long precedent, Van Hollen frames the estate tax as maintenance work on the American bargain, not a reinvention of it. He’s also implicitly separating “wealth” from “work,” emphasizing estates as windfalls rather than earned income, a key distinction when you’re trying to make redistribution sound like responsibility.