Cross-posted from Rational Resistance.
This is the strategy that many of us have been arguing for for months.
(Actually, I didn't know about the wily procedural maneuver, but for a long time I've been saying that they should just go ahead and pass the cuts for incomes up to $250,000 and just let the R's do whatever they're going to do, but the principle's the same.)
They really put the Republicans in a box: vote for something they didn't like, or vote against tax cuts for people who make less than a quarter of a million a year. They chose the second option.
They can come back later in the lame duck session, or next year, and tell the American people that it wasn't good enough to cut taxes for 98% of us, they also want to cut taxes for the top 2%. Let them fight on that issue.
This is another major success for Nancy Pelosi. It also takes some of the pressure off Obama to make a deal with the R's on the other stuff.
What's the down side? The Republicans stop being accommodating?
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Obama is going to be so pissed off when he finds out that someone managed to pass a teeny bit of the Democratic agenda behind his back. After all, his by now famously failed approach has been to give the Republicans everything they want up front, and end up begging them to please take anything else they’d feel like grabbing after long and hard “negotiations”. Then proceed focus on the seemingly more important task of blaming the resulting calamity on those pesky progressives.
It’ll be morbidly fascinating to watch how he decides to make it up to his buddies in the GOP.
Pelosi did the right thing, she fights,and lets see how this will play out in the Senate but …
I have the feeling Obama doesn’t even need Lucy to pull the football away as a kick is attempted. He is Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and he is Lucy pulling it away simultaneously. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12…
For one, I’d say the downside is that for 30 years the Republicans have controlled the media and messaging on economic issues (among others), and so they’ll easily frame their demand for cuts for the top 2% as “job creation” and “economic stimulus”, and most Americans- except for the progressive community, which doesn’t vote for the GOP anyway and so they don’t care about our opinion (nor do we have a voice in any mainstream media)- will continue to buy-into that “logic”.
Doing something good means nothing when those against you can simply say “it’s not good, it’s bad” and the press, conventional wisdom, political atmosphere, and popular culture are all unable or unwilling to look more deeply than sound-bites at the disagreement.
The Senate deal has already fallen through. But of course, Obama fought so hard for this, didn’t he?
Its a tax cut for 100% of the American people.
The Rethuglicans are insisting on passing an ADDITIONAL tax cut for the 2% that earn over $250.000 a year. Let’s stop falling into the trap of letting them frame the debate in their terms all the time.
Where is the reality here?
Since when is a single person who earns $200K even middle class?
Best I was able to find, the median wage in Vermont is about $14.95/hour for a 40 hr work week this yields $31,000 per year.
How many people do we know that earn $200K, and do they need a tax break?
Seems to me that the Ds and Rs are crazy with this tax stuff.
Instead we should skip this altogether, let the cuts sunset, and help the people that really need it with our tax dollars.
“vote against tax cuts for people who make less than a quarter of a million a year”
It doesn’t matter if the Dems corner the GOP and get them on the record as opposing tax cuts for the non-wealthy. No one will ever know it happened! No one on Fox News will ever mention it, Rush Limbaugh won’t mention it, Glenn Beck won’t mention it.
The American People (that vote Republican) will never have a clue that the GOP voted against their tax cuts because the GOP propaganda outlets won’t tell them.
This is a key part of the Democratic Leadership’s strategy to hand all power to the GOP: do things that are a sop to the Democratic base without actually threatening the GOP’s power.
So, yeah, the Dems make a useless gesture that only a handful of politically astute voters may ever hear about, but to which the vast majority of Americans will never know happened.
Yawn. Let me know when the Democrats actually DO something to fight the GOP, not just put up a wall of smoke to make it look like they are doing something when they aren’t really doing anything important – which till be NEVER!