Just how badly has the G.O.P. lost on the payroll tax break issue? Bad enough to lose the Wall Street Journal editorial page opinion like this:
GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.
The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.
That’s pretty damn bad.
And if that’s one outcome of yesterday’s House Republican fiasco, today’s theater should sting at least as much.
In trying to complete a quick pro forma session of the House today, Speaker Pro Tempore Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) walked away while Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) implored the House to take up the bill that would extend the tax break (via ThinkProgress):
Hoyer got a few good slams in on the Republicans before turning the microphone over to Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). Van Hollen never got a chance. His microphone was cut off, and a few seconds later, the video feed was terminated.
But the issue isn’t just about how Scrooge-like the Republicans have become for the holiday season. The other side of this story is about the collapse of Republican discipline. Speaker Boehner had a revolt among the House masses that forced him to beg-off an agreement he made with the Senate leadership and, in particular, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) (via Politico):
While the two men have been remarkably united this year, the year-end package has prompted an unusual amount of confusion, disunity, frustration and increased finger-pointing, both publicly and privately, between House Republicans and Senate Republicans over who is at fault in the political fiasco.
[…]“This is a colossal fumble by the House Republicans,” said a senior Senate GOP aide, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about his own party. “Their inability to recognize a win is costing our party our long-held advantage on the key issue of tax relief. It’s time for Boehner and [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor to look these rookies in the eye and explain how the game is won or lost.”
For most of the past year, the House Teabaggers have been less of a liability than I figured they would be. But with reelection campaigns on the horizon and a distinct lack of positive accomplishments to their credit, the House Teabaggers are feeling unsettled and maybe even nervous.
Boehner will have increasing difficulty keeping the feral hordes from further trashing the Party.
Boehner’s more than proven that he can’t deliver the votes and keep his party in working order to do the work of the people. Senate Republican’s including Scott Brown, the original tea party darling, lined up with the Democrats to vote for this.
What a huge PR blunder the Republican stance on tax relief for wage earners has been! Their actions underline the truth of the charge that they are not driven by any principles other than ‘protect the rich at all costs’.
It’s amazing how they can twist reality and I look forward to their attempts to make a clear move against tax relief for wage earners seem patriotic and noble.
Oh supposedly that’s what their voters wanted – to accomplish NOTHING but tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations (and a few bones to not-so-wealthy) and less regulations, i.e. more air/water/soil poisoning and more bankster bailouts when they screw up.
Hopefully those who stupidly sat it out in 2010 will overcome all the vote suppression Republicans have laid out in the States and throw the idiots on their collective asses.
Remember back when Newt “Blowhard” Gingrich would give impassioned speaches at the House lecturn, turning to point to various Democratic leaders and bravely accuse them of all sorts of imaginary foul deeds? Of course, it was all for show – nobody was in the chamber except for Gingrich, the current Speaker (a Democrat), and a few House employees. One day the Speaker had enough, and ordered the C-Span cameras to pan the chamber to show that Gingrich was speaking to an empty room.
The Republicans were sorely offended by having their charade exposed, and Newt was among those leading the cry that the Speaker had exceeded his powers by not allowing the charade to continue.
Now that the Republicans are in charge, they aren’t going to give the Democrats a chance to even speak the truth – they are cutting off microphones in a feeble attempt to continue their meaningless charade.
Republican economic campaign slogans (recent):
2008: “There’s nothing to see here. The economy is fundamentally sound. Move along. Keep voting for us.”
2010: “Where are the jobs? Didn’t the Democrats promise us jobs? We can supply the jobs!”
2011: “Tax cut for the Middle Class? What tax cut for the middle class? Only “Job Creators” (i.e., the enourmously wealthy) deserve to pay no taxes!”
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So, what are you not going to do with the money the House Republicans are taking from your pocket?
Don’t fret.
It is a matter of Republican principal.
You’ll gladly pay for Republican principal, right?
I know this would suck for folks that need the money, but the two month thing is brilliant politics because we get to kick their asses over and over right into the election.
It’s kind of like the debt sealing was for the Rs until they over-reached, except that putting money in people’s pockets during a recession actually matters.
I’m getting bored of popcorn… anyone got a suggestion for what to snack on during the freak show?
9 – Peanuts. Or what working poor and middle class Americans have been scraping by on for over a generation.
By the way, nice to see the racist, know-nothing asshat noise dampened out in this thread @6-7. Thanks Darryl.
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Wow! The asshats are getting the freeper treatment on HA! About time. What’s it feel like, kiddies?
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I’m a little surprised the stock market hasn’t reacted to GOPers peeling 1% off next year’s projected 2.5% GDP growth. Apparently investors still believe Republicans will pass the payroll tax and unemployment benefits extensions. If so, they have more faith in them than I do. The bright side is that higher tax revenues and lower unemployment and Medicare payouts will reduce the deficit.
Stopping the Republican’s in the house will help more than the lack of money will hurt. And sometimes the Democrats really do need to let the Republicans hurt people to prove that, yes the Republicans will hurt people.
15,250 Trillion doesn’t hurt people eh. Can someone do the math on the interest and tell me as it reachs 20 trillion that it will not hurt people?
@17,
Back in 2002, President Cheney said debt doesn’t matter. Then you Rethugs got us into 2 unpaid for wars (more than doubling the defense budget), passed an unfunded Medicare Part D, and gave the 1%ers an unbudgeted, massive tax cut. Since Obama took office, your Rethug congress critters have worked tirelessly to continue plunging our country farther into debt.
So how much of your “15,250 Trillion” debt do you want to take credit for?
It’s been very simply put, the House Republicans want ONLY one thing, to oppose Obama. If Obama put forward a bill to protect puppies, the House Republicans would rush to be caught on TV shooting puppies in the head. Obama has ONLY just caught on how easy this makes it to paint the Republicans into a corner. Come up with a popular bill, normally supported and philosophically in tune with the Republicans, then watch them oppose it! Priceless!
It also doesn’t help that the Republicans have never asked for a tax cut to be “paid for” before this. The opposite exactly, under Reagan and Bush 1 & 2, they actually ARGUED that tax cuts don’t NEED to be offset/paid for, because tax cuts (in Reaganomics) stimulate the economy so much the government ends up taking in that much or more. Of course this never once worked, ever, but that’s a separate point. That was their argument, until Obama wants a tax cut, then the House Republicans are finding reasons like this to oppose it.
Funny…the big George W. Bush tax cut…not only was IT not paid for (offset with cuts) we spent HUGELY extra on top of it (Iraq war not paid for, drug benefit plan not paid for). The big Bush W tax cut for the rich was even supposed to be temporary because the fiscal hawks worried it would raise the deficit too much, now we have to extend or keep it forever (while pretending to worry about the deficit…and while we extend or keep it forever we STILL DON’T have to pay for THAT tax cut). The middle class payroll tax cut? THAT we have to pay for!
When the Republicans lose by 15 points in the Presidential election, remember this.
Nice little chart of national debt by president.
Gee. Our country was doing fine until Reagan took office.
Then suddenly our debt level takes off.
And yd finally thinks it just might be a problem.
re 20: That chart illustrates your point nicely. In pointing this out to conservative friends, the lesson that they took from the graph was that the national debt rose under FDR and Obama.
The debt reduction of the 90’s they attribute to a Republican congress. The length of the great depression is attributed to the fact that we did not follow Herbert Hoover’s policies long enough and the Cold War ended not because of 50 years of the Marshall Plan, but because Ronald Reagan instructed Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin War.
# 21: Yep, the Republicans have think-tanks where they spend all day coming up with excuses for Republican failures, and then send out their talking points to be repeated daily by Fox News and included in every interview with other news organizations.
Facts have nothing to do with it. It’s like a defense attorney at work, trying to create doubts in the prosecution case, without having to offer any proof of his own. Which is okay in a court of law, but not in national policy debates.
@21 They’d probably argue that FDR shouldn’t have borrowed money to fight WW2 and/or that WW2 was FDR’s fault. Back then the oppositionists didn’t even want FDR to lend obsolete destroyers to England.
I heard a serious political consultant this morning who sounded some warning bells. As much fun as it is to watch the Republican caucus/primary circus and the Republican failures in the House, there are some dark clouds in the future.
First of all, it’s probably not a good idea to presume that Republican ineptness will continue through the campaign season. They will eventually restore some party discipline – at least long enough to get through the November election.
Secondly, Democrats in 2010 presumed that the public would see through the Republican “Where are the jobs?” sloganeering, especially in light of their insistence in 2008 that the economy was “fundamentally sound”. Unfortunately, there are a very large number of low-information voters out there, and combined with some disenchanted Democrats who thought that the President hadn’t gone far enough, control of the House passed to the Republicans. We need to consistently educate those voters on Republican gamesmanship – one way or another. It’s too tempting for many of them, who have other personal and financial problems, to figure they can’t sort through the competing claims and throw up their hands in frustration. We need to give them the tools they need to identify Republican attempts to obfuscate and destroy.
Third, despite Republican errors, re-capturing the House will require an incredible task. The big problem is the number of “red” states where voters rely only on Fox News. This limits the battle to swing states and Democratic states with open seats, which is never a good sign. We need to find a way to return this to a “50 state” strategy, as Dean did in the 2006 election cycle.
Fourth, there’s a pretty good chance that even if we get control of the House, we might lose it in the Senate. It’s just a math issue – more Democratic seats are up for grabs this year, and some of them were newly acquired in the 2006 election (one-term Senators are always more vulnerable than other, more senior Senators). In addition, there are a number of Democratic retirements, turning Democratic seats into open seats. We need a full-court press in the Senate races to retain control of the Senate.
Worst-case scenario: Obama is re-elected, but he faces a Republican House and Senate.
Most probable scenario: Obama is re-elected, Republicans narrowly retain control of the House, and the Senate is back to a 50/50 split (like it was in 2006-2008).
Best-case scenario: Obama is re-elected, Democrates re-gain control of the House, and the Senate remains essentially the same. But this returns us to the Republican “holds” (filibusters) blocking all Congressional activity for the next two years, just as they did in 2009-2010.
BROKEN “System”
Oh dear! Now librul soshuleest Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has caved
Will no one other than TEA Party Patriots stand with Boner to protect the nation from paid for short term tax cuts and unemployment benefits for 160 million Americans?
Here’s the 2012 Senate race breakdown:
Of of a total of 33 Senate seats up for contest in 2012:
DEMOCRATIC SEATS
23 Democrate and Independent seats are up for election. Of these 15 Democrates and independents up for re-election, 6 retiring, and 2 not announced. (Note this count was before Bernie Sander’s retirement announcement). The open seats due to retirements are a particular problem, including Jim Webb’s seat in Virginia.
REPUBLICAN SEATS
10 Republican seats up this time around. Of these, 8 Republicans are seeking re-election, and 2 are retiring. The interesting races there would be freshman Senator Scott Brown in Massachusets (facing a strong challenge from Elizabeth Warren), and Olympia Snow in Maine (who already has two primary challengers from the Tea Party, but has very high popularity ratings).
United States Senate Elections 2012
@24 One thing that needs to change is the Senate’s faux-filibuster practices. If Republican obstructionists want to filibuster a bill or appointment, then make ’em filibuster it! And that means they have to keep someone on the floor, talking, for 100 hours straight. Shit, make ’em stay there for a year. It’s time Democrats got some balls and stopped letting GOPers “filibuster” merely by one senator waving a hand.
@26 Snowe won’t have any problems.
@27,
The one thing that really needs to change is having career politicians entrenched in their jobs forever and ever. Term limits are what we need to end these careerist sociopaths’ reigns.
Supreme Court, House, Senate – all need limits on the length of time they can act on the national stage. No more career politicians!
I think Obama will get re-elected in 2012, and the Republicans will hold on to the House and gain slightly in the Senate. That’s not such a bad outcome – Obama can “retire” in 2017, write a few books, give some speeches. Hell, I bet he’ll make more money than Al Gore did off of global warming!
re 27: I agree with you in principle, but one of the problems for newbies in DC is that the system is so complex now that it takes a term or two for a new congressman to figure it out.
If there were strict term limits, some people worry that careerist congressional staffers would run the country, and not the elected officials.
What do you think?
re 30: The problem with that is that Republicans are incompetent, money driven nincompoops who will once again plunge the world into chaos.
0h noes!
where are the TEA Party Patriots when you need them?
The new news is that Boner is going to give in to the 90% majority in the Senate and allow a completely paid for 2 month extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. OMG!
Does Boner not understand what this uncertainty will do to Small Business? Does Boner not understand that this approach is not in the Constitution?
Well, I hope you 160,000,000 people are happy with yourselves.
This is probably going to go just like the big guberment takeover of GM.
What the hell happened to the Braveheart approach?
Well, it has happened. The end of Murika.
Washington (Dec 22)
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) today issued the following statement:
What agreement? This is exactly what the evil Reid and Obama demanded!
Fortunately nobody is going to be able to ask our esteemed Puget Sound Congressman, David Reichert (R-WA) why he flip-flopped right in to the Democratic party’s hand. Reichert doesn’t do town halls!
# 33: Yep, AOL (Huffington Post) is reporting that the GOP leadership in the House has caved. This assumes, of course, that Boener has the support of the rest of the Republicans in the House.
MSNBC is still reporting that a deal is not confirmed.
# 34: Our posts seem to be crossing one another.
It looks like a full cave-in by the Republicans in the House.
Of course, what they really wanted was for the Democrats in the Senate to comprimise as far as they would go, and then have the House come back for another bite of the apple. They wanted our “final compromise” to become simplly the “starting position” for another set of demands. They got caught at it, and had no choice but to give up.
But that doesn’t mean they won’t try the same thing two months from now.
One caveat: What happens if a single Tea-Party faithful stands up and objects to the “unanimous consent” procedure. Under the rules, it blocks the measure entirely, it has to go through the normal processes which could take weeks.
@31,
A simple solution: change the congressional staff with job term limits, too. They do it in other places. Take Ft. Knox, where all the gold is. There comes a point in a worker’s tenure there that he or she has to change jobs. No more Ft. Knox for them. They go to another place to work, but not where the gold is kept.
# 37: We could do that in Congress simply by changing the rules for committee assignments. Nobody gets to be on the House Ways and Means committee, for example, for more than a term or two, and the Senate Finance Committee would be limited to one term.
No legislation or constitutional amendment needed, just a change in the rules of the House and Senate at the beginning of the Congressional term.
But a more important issue, in my mind, is ending the circle between Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Dept. (or Securities and Exchange Commission). The same names keep coming up over and over again as they move from one position to another. They claim that nobody except a handful of people in the world know enough to manage international finance, but I don’t believe that’s true.
Getting back to the Republican cave-in:
The media kept referring to this as simply a wage tax cut issue. This mostly benefited the Democrats. But it was never a wage tax cut issue – what was really at issue was all the baggage the Republicans wanted to load onto the bill before they would consent to letting it pass.
The gas pipeline was a central part of that issue – Republicans referred to it as a “shovel-ready jobs issue”, but what they really wanted was for the project to get a free pass from having to file environmental impact statements.
At risk was the huge aquifer which supplies well water that irrigates crops and supplies municipal water to many of the towns throughout the mid-west, in a multi-state region. If that aquifer was spoiled, it would devestate the economy of almost one-quarter of the U.S. right in it’s heartland, turning cities and small towns into ghost towns, and forcing America to become a net importer of wheat and corn for the first time in it’s history.
And that’s just what the Republicans in the Senate demanded, and Democrates there partially caved in on that measure in a compromise to keep worker’s paychecks intact for another two months.
In the House, however, the Tea Party purists there wanted to load everything but the kitchen sink onto the bill. They wanted significant re-structuring of unemployment benefits, medicaid, and medicare to be dumped into the bill – without hearings or an examination of any kind into the impacts.
By noon today, Democratic leaders in the House were beginning to give interviews describing the idiological demands which the House Tea Party Republicans were making before this tax cut could be considered. Shortly thereater, House leadership and ultimately the Tea Party leaders agreed to back off and accept the Senate bill.
Did they do so because they were getting bad press over their stance which was threatening to increase taxes on working people in a little over a week? Or because their other demands were so extreme that they didn’t want them publicized, and had gambled that the Democrats would have caved in on the bill before those demands were ever reported in the media?
They might have felt that they dodged a bullet on that one, and breathed a sigh of relief.
@33
two months….big fucking deal…what an insult.
our govt is pathetic.