THE LAME-DUCK SENATE HAS BEEN EXTREMELY BUSY NOT PASSING LEGISLATION. VOTES ON TWO DEMOCRATIC PROPOSALS TO EXTEND BUSH TAX CUTS FOR EVERYBODY BUT THE RICH WENT LIKE THIS: 53 TO 37 AND 53 TO 36. SO, OF COURSE THIS MEANS THEY FAILED MISERABLY.
Dear Answerperson:
My boyfriend is a liberal Democrat and ever since the president announced his tax deal with the Republicans, he has been impossible to live with. First he burned his “Audacity of Hope” sweater. Then he began messing up the cat’s litter box, claiming he needed to draw “lines in the sand.” Now he wants to call off our wedding because he says that when you put your trust in people, they break your heart.
SIGNED: Miserable Moderate
Dear Miserable:
Ask your boyfriend if he would rather spend the entire holiday season wondering what Senator Joe Lieberman will do next and whether Olympia Snowe will vote for cloture. Then he will turn pale and offer to take you out for a nice dinner.
SIGNED: Answerperson
Look on the bright side, Democratic base. You’ve been urging President Obama to get really mad. Ever since the inauguration, you’ve been waiting for him to take a stand, point fingers at the people who are blocking progress and demand that they get the heck out of the road.
And this week he did it! Yippee!
Of course the liberal Democrats did not really plan on his getting mad at the liberal Democrats. But you can’t have everything.
“This isn’t the politics of the moment. This has to do with what can we get done right now,” the president said heatedly as he defended his tax deal with the Republicans against outrage from the Congressional left.
It takes a lot to make President Obama incoherent. I think the vision of trying to corral 60 votes in the Senate on the night before Christmas sent him over the brink.
The lame-duck Senate has been extremely busy not passing a range of legislation. The votes on two Democratic proposals to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everybody but the rich were 53 to 37 and 53 to 36. Of course, under venerable Senate tradition, that means they failed entirely.
It was at that point that Obama announced a deal with the Republicans to salvage unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and create a sort of ministimulus bill with tax cuts for everybody, including the working poor, besides the dreaded, hated giveaway to the undeserving wealthy.
“The American people are outraged!” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He wanted the president to draw that line in the sand, let the unemployment benefits lapse, the tax code fall into limbo, and hold out until public opinion forced 60 votes to come around.
If you really wanted the American people to rally around no-tax-cuts-for-richies, shouldn’t we have had this conversation before the election? It’s a lot easier to send Washington a message at the polls than on a protest march in a sub-zero wind-chill factor.
No, we waited until now because the Senate leaders left the timing up to their members who were running for re-election, and the Democrats in question said they’d rather not have to go on the record.
O.K., I’ve got to admit it. I’ve fallen off the line-in-the-sand bandwagon.
For one thing, opposing the Obama-Republican deal puts you on the same side as Sarah Palin, who sent out one of her twitters from hell on the subject, and Christine O’Donnell, the former Senate candidate. At a Tea Party meeting on Dec. 7, O’Donnell announced that it was a day of sorrow and “Tragedy comes in threes: Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards’s passing and Barack Obama’s announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits.”
(I am happy to note that O’Donnell has announced that she’s got a book deal and a new political action committee. Really, I don’t know what I’d do if she went away.)
Plus, the Senate has worn me down. The filibuster rule makes it impossible to do anything more difficult than passing rules against tainted food, and the Democrats have not made any serious attempt to get rid of the filibuster rule. So work around them, I say.
We have no idea if Obama’s unheroic attempt to get a deal done is going to pass. The Democratic senators who totally failed to exempt the wealthy from a tax-cut extension are outraged at the president for giving up on them.
“This is beyond politics. This is about justice and doing what’s right,” said Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana as she slammed “the almost, you know, moral corruptness” of tax cuts for millionaires.
It was a stirring statement, and would have been even more so if Landrieu had not been one of the few Democrats who actually voted to put the tax cuts on the books in the first place in 2001. Senator Harry Reid has already warned that members of his caucus “have concerns” that will need to be addressed. He has one himself about legalizing online poker, a matter that the casino interests in his state of Nevada are very excited about.
So this is what it takes to put the drama in Obama.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Thursday, December 9th 2010 at 5:58PM
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