Now Republicans can work to minimize the public relations fallout over being bizarrely tarred as favoring tax increases on the middle class. It's going to take a few news cycles and perhaps a few pessimistic economic forecasts before the administration will be forced back into what should rightfully be a defense of its failed policies. In the meanwhile, the MFM outlets are having a field day with the schadenfreude, so might as well roll with it for a while.
At New York Times, "The House Backs Down":
For a full year, House Republicans have replaced governing with confrontations that they allow to reach the brink of crisis, only then making extreme demands in exchange for a resolution. On Thursday, that strategy crumbled. Battered by public opinion and undermined by more reasonable Senate Republicans, the House’s leaders backed down and signed off on a deal to continue the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for two months.Well, enjoy the moment, New York Times. Paying for that "tax cut" is really more about paying for the endless entitlement state, which we can't afford and which is killing innovation and entrepreneurialism. The GOP House screwed up the messaging and tactics, but the larger goal to starve the bureaucratic beast is a necessity. The tough choices of reinventing government would perhaps be less wrenching during a period of robust growth. But we don't have any luxuries right now.
The House Republicans’ stubborn opposition to the extension “may not have been politically the smartest thing in the world,” Speaker John Boehner said, in the understatement of the week. He still called it “a good fight.”
If the deal goes through on Friday — and even one angry lawmaker could stall it — the paychecks of 160 million workers will not shrink for at least eight weeks and three million jobless workers will keep their benefits. That will be paid for largely by mortgage fees, and negotiations will resume on paying for the remaining 10 months.
A Republican demand that President Obama make a decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline will remain in the measure, as negotiated by the Senate last week. Republicans also won some minor adjustments to prevent small businesses from being harmed by the extension.
The struggle to reach an agreement, which was a clear victory for President Obama, exposed voters in the starkest way to the real temperament of the House that Americans elected a year ago. If the president wants it, they’re against it. If it might assist the middle class, as opposed to the rich, they will concoct an economic argument to oppose it. (“The payroll tax cut isn’t really that effective.”) And if it absolutely has to pass, they will throw in stray ideas — an oil pipeline, air pollution regulations — to win some part of their agenda, or kill the bill trying.
The Republican wounds this time were entirely self-inflicted. The crisis over the two-month extension wasn’t really about the payroll tax at all; it was about the hurt feelings of bumptious House members having to accede to a deal driven by the Senate and the White House. The real confrontation, over paying for the tax cut, is yet to come.
See Don Surber for more on that, "It’s worse than Zero Hedge said."
2 comments:
Let us not forget that Boehner & Co had the ground cut out from under them by McConnell and the rest of the RINO herd in the Senate who were only too eager to reach across the aisle to their friends in the Democrat Party.
As Joe Stilwell once observed, it's no fun fighting a war when you have to fight people who are supposed to be on your side.
This is why as many Lefty Republicans, as well as Democrats, in the Senate need to be replaced
Bonehead, Cantor, and McConnell must go.
-Dave
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