Death and Taxes: The political fortunes of the estate tax.

No policy of the Bush administration has drawn more withering scorn than its drive to eliminate the estate tax. In opposing the tax, Bush "kowtow[s] to plutocrats" and displays "willful obtuseness." That's the verdict of Andrew Sullivan -- and he's one of the most pro-Bush pundits around.

For New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the fact that only the top 2 percent of estates pay the tax means that the campaign against it is "[t]he most remarkable example of how politics has shifted in favor of the wealthy." Marshall Wittmann, another commentator, said the campaign was one of the reasons he left the Republican party this year. Conservative economist Irwin Stelzer has argued in The Weekly Standard that the estate tax serves the public good by promoting meritocracy. That's Sullivan's view, too.

Trying to abolish the estate tax does not, in short, win rave reviews on op-ed pages. But there is a strong case for abolition. What's more, abolition is popular. It's not a favor Republicans do for their contributors behind closed doors. Norm Coleman, Jim Talent, and John Thune -- the three candidates the GOP touted all year as its best shots at picking up Senate seats -- all trumpeted their opposition to the tax and accused their opponents of supporting it.

It's true that opposing the estate tax wins the Republicans support from some powerful lobbies: the National Restaurant Association, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, and the Farm Bureau, to name a few. But repeal also has broad and deep support from voters. In May, the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner found that 60 percent of likely voters favored repeal, with 43 percent saying they "strongly" favored it. (The only silver lining for Democrats is that voters preferred "reform" to repeal, once exposed to a series of arguments for that position.) Wittmann aside, the issue seems to be winning votes for the GOP.

Under the terms of the Bush tax cut, the estate tax is scheduled to be slowly phased out over the course of the decade. But then the tax cut expires, so the estate tax comes back in full force in 2011. Republicans are pushing to make estate-tax repeal permanent. In June, 41 House Democrats broke ranks to vote for permanent repeal. Eleven Senate Democrats -- more than a fifth of Tom Daschle's caucus -- voted for a resolution supporting permanent abolition.

While campaigning for re-election, Sen. Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat, said he supports repeal (even though he actually voted against making repeal permanent). Democratic senator Mary Landrieu ran an ad that told Louisianans that "[s]he . . . voted eleven times to abolish the death tax."

Those Democrats who oppose repeal hasten to explain that they favor estate-tax relief. The estate tax currently exempts estates smaller than $675,000, and these Democrats would raise that exemption. Even the late Paul Wellstone took this tack in his re-election campaign. Estate- tax opponents, however, regard the exemption proposals as a dodge. Most of them build on an existing provision of estate-tax law that is so complicated that almost nobody ever gets exempted.