“Hijacked By Ideologues”: The Republicans Have Now Agreed To Raise Taxes For The Entire Country
The inside line from Washington is that there will be no Fiscal Cliff deal before the end of the year.
That’s not surprising. Unfortunately, it always seemed unlikely that our politicians would agree to any vote that could be framed as them having voted to “raise taxes” — which any deal before December 31 could have been framed as.
The more likely scenario seemed to be that politicians would wait until taxes increased automatically on January 1 and then heroically vote to cut them — at least some of them.
And that’s still my bet about what will happen in January.
But just because it seemed likely that politicians would be ruled by “politics” instead of pragmatism doesn’t mean this is something to be proud of.
And let’s be clear about what has happened in the past two months.
What has happened is that the political party that has based its entire existence on never agreeing to a tax hike of any kind has essentially agreed to tax hike for the entire country.
By not accepting the Democrats’ offer to extend the Bush tax cuts for ~98% of Americans, the Republicans have agreed to let taxes rise on ALL Americans.
The Republicans have done this, it appears, only (or at least mainly) in a stubborn attempt to preserve lower tax rates on the highest-earning Americans.
And now those tax rates, too, will go up.
And the economy will slow down.
The Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the tax hikes on the Democrats, but most Americans have seen through this. And rightly so. The Republicans agreed to the coming tax hikes when they voted for the legislation in the summer of 2011. And now, by refusing to extend the tax cuts for all Americans but the richest 2%, the Republicans have tacitly once again agreed to raise taxes on all Americans.
This is what happens when a party that used to be known for pragmatism and responsibility allows itself to be hijacked by ideologues.
A deal to mute the impact of the Fiscal Cliff and raise the debt ceiling should be within easy reach of reasonable people on both sides of the aisle.
Unfortunately, our government isn’t run by reasonable people anymore. Especially on the Republican side.
NOTE: This is my personal view, not “Business Insider’s” So if you want to lecture someone about how the Republicans are absolutely right to agree to raise taxes on the entire country just to avoid voting to increase taxes on the highest-earning Americans, please direct those notes to me.
By: Henry Blodgett, Business Insider, December 27, 2012
“John Boehner’s Christmas Gift”: A Guarantee That The Republican House Will Destroy The Economy
Last week, we learned that Speaker of the House John Boehner has no control over his majority. We’ve seen Boehner have trouble with his caucus before, of course — a significant portion of these people are crazy — but the failure of “Plan B” was different. In the past Boehner has had trouble whipping votes to support things that were destined to become law. Boehner couldn’t get his caucus to support TARP because TARP was awful and was also definitely going to happen. Boehner couldn’t get the votes for the 2011 debt deal because conservatives thought they’d eventually force an even better deal. But this was a totally symbolic gesture that never had any shot at passing the Senate or getting signed by the president. Boehner’s “Plan B” was a stupid pointless empty gesture, and that is why its failure is actually slightly scary, in addition to being hilarious.
The point of “Plan B” was to give Republicans a means of blaming Democrats when everyone’s taxes go up next year, while also giving them an opportunity to claim that they supported raising taxes on rich people. The problem was, Republicans really don’t support raising taxes on rich people, and they feel so strongly about this that they didn’t want to pretend to support a tax increase.
What is especially silly about all of this is that in any sort of sensible political system none of it would be happening. A majority of Americans just voted for Democrats to control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, which would seem to indicate that a majority of American voters would just prefer it if Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided all of this for themselves. But that’s not the way our archaic political system works, and instead we will watch this unpopular anthropomorphic Camel 100 carefully negotiate a compromise with the president that his party will refuse to support, until we either extend all tax cuts forever or “go over the cliff” and cause every Sunday show panelist in the country to hyperventilate until losing consciousness.
How did we get here? Keep in mind, your average congressperson is as dumb as your average regular person, and Republican members listen to the same talk radio and read the same right-wing blogs and watch the same Fox News as every other conservative. It’s always been comforting to imagine that canny evil masterminds huddle in backrooms plotting how to use the right-wing media machine to manipulate the rubes into accepting whatever the corporate elites want, but the story now is that the canny masterminds have no control over the media operation they’ve built and the “grownups” cannot convince the true believers to do shit. There’s really no talking sense into Michele Bachmann and Steve King, and every two years gerrymandered ultra-conservative districts send more and more Kings and Bachmanns to the House. And Republicans know that their safe districts are only safe from Democrats, not even-crazier Republicans.
John Boehner will probably be fine. He’ll likely remain speaker even, mostly because no one else wants that horrible job. America might not be fine.
“Going over the fiscal cliff” will be a fun adventure at first, especially because it has been so long since America has had any sort of tax hike or defense budget cut, but shortly after the “cliff” comes the debt ceiling increase vote, and there is really no chance, at all, of the House raising the debt ceiling, under any circumstance. Maybe if the president agrees to block grant Medicare and return America to the gold standard. And promises to personally fire 100 teachers.
The idea that “going over the cliff” would give the president enough leverage to get a halfway decent deal — with some stimulus up front and everything! — depended on a House of Representatives capable of acting rationally. It’s apparent that they are in fact prepared to intentionally tank the entire American economy.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, December 24, 2012
“It’s Our System On The Cliff”: Republicans Can Spend Two Years Doing Absolutely Nothing Or Try To Help Solve The Country’s Problems
The United States faces a crisis in our political system because the Republican Party, particularly in the House of Representatives, is no longer a normal, governing party.
The only way we will avoid a constitutional crackup is for a new, bipartisan majority to take effective control of the House and isolate those who would rather see the country fall into chaos than vote for anything that might offend their ideological sensibilities.
In a democratic system with separated powers, two houses of Congress, split between the parties, a normal party accepts that compromise is the only way to legislate. A normal party takes into account election results. A normal party recognizes when the other side has made real concessions. A normal party takes responsibility.
By all of these measures, the Republican majority that Speaker John Boehner purports to lead is abnormal. That is the meaning of his catastrophic failure to gather the votes for his “Plan B” proposal on the “fiscal cliff.” Many of his most radical members believe they have a right to use any means at their disposal to impose their views on the country, even if they are only a minority in Congress.
There may, however, be good news in the disarray: The right wing of the Republican House has chosen to marginalize itself from any serious negotiations. The one available majority for action, especially on budgets, is a coalition uniting most Democrats with those Republicans who still hold the old-fashioned view that they were elected to help run the country.
To avert a fiscal nightmare in the short run, this potential majority needs to be allowed to work its will. The result may well be a modestly more progressive solution than President Obama offered Boehner, a deal with somewhat fewer cuts and more revenue. That’s the price the right wing will have to pay for refusing to govern.
This is almost exactly what happened in 1990, when the most conservative Republicans rejected a deficit-reduction agreement negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and Democrats in Congress. After a conservative rebellion brought the initial bill down, a more progressive measure was enacted with more Democratic votes.
In the longer run, the non-tea party wing of the GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be subject to the whims of colleagues to their right or look to the center for alliances with the Democrats. The choice is plain: We can spend two years doing absolutely nothing, or we can try to solve the country’s problems. This includes the problem of gun violence, and the question is whether the GOP will reject the tone-deaf extremism of NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s bizarre response to the killings in Newtown, Conn.
Our political structure has been disfigured in another way: In November’s election, Democrats failed to win the House even though they received about a million more votes in House contests than the Republicans did. Republicans were protected by gerrymandered districts and by political geography: Democrats tend to win urban and certain suburban districts by overwhelming margins.
In Pennsylvania, to pick a stark case, Democrats edged out the Republicans in the popular vote for House races. But given how the districts were drawn, this resulted in the Republicans winning 13 seats to only five for the Democrats.
Both parties gerrymander, of course, but Republicans had far more influence over the process this time because the 2010 election gave them dominance of so many legislatures. Thus did one election shape our politics for a decade, even though the country changed its mind one election later.
This unfortunate moment is a vindication of those like my colleagues Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who have been arguing that today’s Republicans are fundamentally different from their forebears. In their appropriately named book, “It’s Even Worse than It Looks,” Mann and Ornstein called the current GOP “an insurgent outlier in American politics,” and described the party this way: “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise . . . and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Their words are a rather precise description of why Boehner was unable to deliver a majority of his party to his budget bill.
It’s true that Boehner miscalculated, foolishly asking Republicans to vote for a symbolic tax increase that had no chance of becoming law. And the speaker fed the fires of rebellion with repeated false claims that Obama had made no meaningful concession when the president had, in fact, annoyed his base by making rather big ones.
But now, at least, we know something important: The current Republican majority in the House cannot govern. Only a coalition across party lines can get the public’s business done.
By: E. J. Dionne, J., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 23, 2012
“Blatantly Undemocratic”: Republican Thugs In The House Hope To Derail President Obama’s Tax-Hike Bill
As you ponder whether the Obama tax hike can pass the House, I bet you think something like, “All he needs is a few Republicans.” Right? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it. Obama himself said last week: “If we can just get a few House Republicans on board, we can pass the bill in the House, it will land on my desk, and I am ready—I have got a bunch of pens ready—to sign this bill.” That’s how it works, right—218 votes? Friends, you’re hopelessly behind the times. The Republicans won’t allow measures to pass with just any 218 votes. It has to be mostly Republicans. Welcome to the little-discussed but possibly pivotal concept of the “majority of the majority.”
What does this mean? Pretty much just what it says: For Speaker John Boehner to bring any measure to the House floor, he has to see that a majority of the majority—that is, a majority of his GOP caucus—will support it. You might have in theory a bill that could pass with the support of 109 Democrats and 109 Republicans to reach the needed 218. You couldn’t ask for more bipartisanship than that. But 109 is not a majority of 241, so if Boehner and his whips were counting noses accurately in the run-up, this perfectly balanced measure would never see the light of day for a vote.
Sounds like madness? Yes, it does, and it is. But surely this is something, you say, that goes back a ways, and something both sides have done. Well, not really. It goes back, says congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, only to Denny Hastert, the GOP speaker during the Bush years who was the first to use the phrase. “It was a Hastert original,” Ornstein explained to me Monday. “In earlier eras, it would never have worked—too much heterogeneity in caucuses, to start. Hastert was a different Speaker, in another sense, seeing himself as more a field general in the president’s army than as first and foremost leader of the independent House, but to him that meant creating a majority party machine. More than anything, it formed the parliamentary party mindset.”
Sarah Binder, the congressional scholar at Brookings, notes that in fairness, the pseudo-parliamentary mindset began to develop in the 1970s and 1980s. “I think its parliamentary roots actually stem from liberal Democrats’ effort to challenge the power of conservative committee chairs who dominated the House agenda for a good portion of the 20th century,” Binder says. The Democrats started using the powerful House Rules Committee more aggressively to control the flow of what could and could not get to the floor.
So the Democrats certainly managed the action, but all we have to do is look at history and see that the Democrats didn’t follow this majority of the majority nonsense. Exhibit A: NAFTA. It passed with a minority of the Democratic majority but an overwhelming majority of Republicans.
Nope—it was Republicans who instituted this noxious rule, during the Bush era, probably at Karl Rove’s behest, to ram through every wedge issue they could. Just another manifestation of turning legislating into warfare by other means and making compromise impossible. In spirit, it’s like a House version of the filibuster. A minority of the body gets to block the potential will of a majority, and on a purely and unashamedly partisan basis.
So what does it have to do with the fiscal cliff? It means that you can forget the idea of 20 or so non-wild-eyed Republicans joining the Democrats in passing the higher tax rates. As Republican Tom Cole said last week—and Cole, remember, is one of the reasonable ones here, one of the few GOPers who has declared that he’d vote with the Democrats on such a measure: “You’re not going to come up here and be able to put together a deal with 170 Democrats and 40 Republicans—that’s just not in the cards.” The number, for the record, would have to be at least 26 Republicans in December. If they wait until the next session starts in January, the required number would go down to 18, since the GOP lost eight seats in the election.
But all that is academic because under GOP rules—and this by the way is an unwritten rule; no American political party could ever get away with putting such a thing in print and making it official—the tax-hike proposal would need to have the support of the majority of the House Republican caucus even to reach the floor. It’s blatantly undemocratic, and not enough people know that this is how the Republican Party operates, and I suspect a lot of them wouldn’t even believe it if you told them. It doesn’t help matters when even the president misrepresents the actual facts when he’s out on the stump.
There’s one possible way out of this, a wrinkle reported on Monday by ABC News. It seems that some Republicans are now talking about a scenario whereby they would allow a bill to come to the floor—the bill the Senate already passed, keeping the Bush tax rates on all dollars earned except above $250,000, but raising the rates at that end—and simply vote “present,” allowing it to pass on entirely Democratic votes.
I think that if they vote “present” on something 60-plus percent of the people support, they’ll look like complete idiots to your average American. Voting “present” on the biggest fiscal vote in years, to keep Grover Norquist happy and their caucus united? Hey, if that’s how they want to play it, fine by me. It’ll be nice to see their foolishness outweigh their malevolence.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 4, 2012
“GOP Fiscal Maneuvers”: Republicans Are More Preoccupied Now With The Optics Of “Not Surrendering”
So there are two pieces of news out today about the Republican response to the president’s so-far-very-successful maneuvers on the big fiscal issues. The first is a formal counter-offer from the House GOP leadership (with, significantly, Eric Cantor’s and Paul Ryan’s names joining that of John Boehner). It specifically calls for $800 billion in new revenues (close to what Boehner put on the table in his repudiated 2011 debt limit deal), but without rate increases. And it bites the bullet somewhat on spending by calling for a 2-year increase in the Medicare eligibiity age and a government-wide adjustment in how cost of living adjustments are calculated.
You could read this as Republicans deciding to get more specific on “entitlement reform” than on taxes (it’s extremely unlikely that you can come up with $800 billion in “loopholes” to close without hitting the middle class), or simply choosing the least inflammatory ways to reduce entitlement spending. Or–and this is my personal take at the moment–it could just be an offer meant to be refused that just gets the GOP out of the immediate problem it had with appearing unwilling to put anything on the table.
Arriving just before the “counter-offer” were a host of less formal reports that Republicans have a fallback strategy of letting an extension of the Bush tax cuts for taxable income under 250k pass without their votes, and then fighting Democrats tooth and nail after the beginning of the new year on the debt limit increase or indeed, anything else Obama wants.
I share Jonathan Chait’s puzzlement over this supposed strategy:
[Y]eah, Republicans would still have things to fight over. Obama is going to want measures to reduce unemployment. Republicans can dangle those. Obama is also going to want to not destroy the credit rating of the U.S. government for no good reason, and Republicans will threaten to do that, though it’s not clear that Obama is going to submit to another blackmailing on this.
But Republicans will also need Obama to sign a law canceling out the huge defense spending cuts scheduled for next year. If Obama is starting out with a trillion in higher revenue in his pocket (through expiration of the Bush tax cuts on the rich), and the extension of the middle-class tax cuts have largely taken the threat of a recession off the table, then he’ll still be negotiating from a position of strength. He’ll be able to offer Republicans cuts to entitlement programs plus defense spending increases in return for modest revenue increases, which don’t have to involve rate hikes, just to get to his own budget proposal.
Chait’s hunch is that Republicans are more preoccupied now with the optics of “not surrendering” on big fiscal votes than they are with actually imposing their priorities on Obama and the country. In other words, both maneuvers may be aimed at cutting losses without provoking an overt conservative backlash, and keeping–as Grover Norquist has suggested–their “fingerprints off the murder weapon” of any deal that can be described as betraying the sacrosanct “conservative principles.”
If that’s all true, it’s a strange way of exercising what Republicans claim is their co-responsibility for solving the nation’s fiscal problems after a “status quo election.” One might even reach the conclusion they lost.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 3, 2012
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