Brendan Dunn Discusses Senate Tenure with POLITICO

POLITICO, in a feature titled “On the way out” from its “Morning tax” column, ran a Q&A with Brendan Dunn, who is leaving the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to join Akin Gump this week as a partner in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office (learn more here).

Dunn, who worked closely with McConnell on, among other legislative projects, 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, discussed this work. Among the questions:

• What he’ll miss: “The ability to come over here and see the entire Senate — not just the entire Senate, but the entire Congress working from a 35,000 foot-level is really remarkable.”
• What he and McConnell did to craft the tax law: “Members kind of were all over the place on health care. I think we were able to run a much more traditional committee/leadership process on tax reform. We helped to make sure there was buy-in conference-wide on what it is that the committee was doing.”
• Whom to credit for the tax law: “From my perspective, the indispensable man on tax reform was [former House Ways and Means Chairman] Dave Camp. [W]hat Camp did was he put this thing out there such that we [had] a rough draft, and the business community knew what the pitfalls were and they had been digesting that stuff for years.”