Boehner's New Plan A For 'Abidcation" of His Responsiblity

     Throughout this fiscal cliff fiasco I've assumed that there would be a deal, that despite what the media alarmists say, we will avoid the fiscal cliff. It's now beginning to seem I was too optimistic. I guess I overestimated GOP House Speaker Boehner reasoning he can't be this silly.

     I just figured that he had the common sense God gave a billy goat and would figure that there is no way to stop the tax cuts on the rich anyway and doing a deal in January will be less efficacious to the GOP as there will be a more Democratic Senate with 8 more Dems in the House as well. Beyond that the public has made clear they will blame the GOP if there is no deal. And yes, I thought, so help me, that even Boehner would realize that getting something done was the right thing to do.

     However, we are hearing more and more talk about going over the cliff. Greg Sargent now seems to think it's likely. Politico today declares a deal is "less and less likely."

    "Nearly all the major players in the fiscal cliff negotiations are starting to agree on one thing: A deal is virtually impossible before the New Year."

     "Unlike the bank bailout in 2008, the tax deal in 2010 and the debt ceiling in 2011, the Senate almost certainly won’t swoop in and help sidestep a potential economic calamity, senior officials in both parties predicted on Wednesday."


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/fiscal-cliff-deal-increasingly-unlikely-85511.html#ixzz2GGugMzla

      Regarding the Senate, Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is also increasingly pessimistic:

      "With only four negotiating days 'til "cliff mess," the Senate returned Thursday with Majority Leader Harry Reid expressing doubt that a deal can be reached to avoid the automatic confluence of higher taxes and deep spending cuts."

     "it looks like that's where we're headed," Reid said of the "fiscal cliff." He accused Speaker John Boehner of running a "dictatorship" by "not allowing the vast majority of the House of Representatives to get what they want."

    "President Barack Obama also cut short his Hawaii vacation to face the increasingly familiar deadline showdown in the nation's capital, with even a stopgap solution now in doubt. Before leaving, he made phone calls to Reid, Boehner, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, the White House said."

    On the Senate floor, Reid challenged Boehner to call the House back into session.
"They've done nothing," Reid said of the GOP-controlled House. "The speaker has just a few days left to change his mind," Reid said, but added: "I don't know time wise how it will happen."

      http://www.cnbc.com/id/100341266

      The level of irresponsibility out of the GOP is just breathtaking. I never thought I could "underestimate" them-on how irresponsible they can be-but I see now that even I "misunderestimated them" this time.

      If we truly do go over it's amazing-the last respective deals between Obama and Boehner were only a few hundred billion apart. Reid's choice of words is apt. A dictator is exactly how Boehner is acting. If he refuses to even allow a vote on the House floor he is clearly not allowing the House to vote on something they quite possibly will pass if given a choice.

     I don't get his  calculus here if we won't get a deal. I understood that he couldn't give in to early and that he had to put up some theatrics. I don't see how going over the cliff in any way helps him or his party. Most people will blame him and the GOP and he likely won't get his shot at chained CPI again. In addition, he probably won't get a floor of $400,000 next time.

    Jon Bernstein thinks what we may see is more "kicking the can down the road" on the fiscal matters-not the tax cuts. This, as he observes, is mostly in line with Dem preferences anyway-he also assumes this won't come now before January 1.

    "Matt Yglesias has a good item this morning about the possibility of pushing back the fiscal cliff deadline. Good topic, and I'm surprised there hasn't been more talk about it. Congress certainly could extend deadlines on everything for two weeks, four weeks, whatever, to allow time for negotiations to get done."

    "Of course, there's no reason that all the deadlines would have to be pushed back. Looking at the two big pieces of it:

     "The issue with taxes is that not only do liberals believe that the expiration of Bush-era tax rates gives them a bargaining advantage, but many Republicans may well prefer that outcome as well. I think if there was any information generated by the Plan B fiasco, it might have been just that: some Republicans really would prefer an eventual outcome that involves relatively higher tax rates as long as they don't have to make an affirmative vote for it. If that's true, then we have to go over the cliff to make a deal; expiration of the tax rates is basically a necessary condition for the votes that are going to be needed."

     "On the other hand, one would think that there may well be a coalition available to kick the spending can down the road. Most mainstream Democrats simply don't want the spending cuts that the sequester would make, certainly on the domestic side; they may like the level of Pentagon cuts, but even there many Democrats don't, and even more don't want Pentagon cuts carried out this way. On the Republican side, pro-military Members of Congress might be willing to suspend the sequester while a deal is in the works. The resistance to kicking the spending can down the road should come from those who really do want to slash government spending; they might fear, with good reason, that Democrats would lose the incentive to bargain if they believed they could just make the sequester go away. Still, hawks might argue that a one-time, short-term delay would be worth it because it would avoid disruptions in military procurement, and that Republicans could always pull the plug if Democrats responded by stalling and requesting more delays."

      "I'm not going to go into more of it, but don't forget that Bush-era tax cuts and the spending sequester are only two of the pieces of the "fiscal cliff." Yet another issue in any can-kicking is negotiating whether other things would be part of it, and the more complicated kicking-the-can negotiations get, the more it probably seems to everyone involved that they might as well just stick to the main negotiations."

      "At any rate: if there's to be any delay, it could come together very, very, quickly, as long as everyone agrees -- or it could take a week or more to pass, if a handful of Senators decide to grind things to a halt. I think the logic is there for a sequestration pause, but it's a pretty close call, depending mainly on the balance within the GOP between Pentagon hawks versus spending cut true believers. But don't expect anything on taxes; that part of the cliff is only going to be avoided if Republicans just decide to surrender in the next few days, and that seems very unlikely."

      http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/12/which-cans-to-kick.html

       Again, I don't get why the GOP don't surrender now-it will happen January 1 without consent. At this point, there likely are the votes in the House to pass a tax cut for just those under $250,000-all the Dems with a significant amount of Repubs. That Boehner won't allow a vote on something that has House support is behaving like a dictator and it's a tremendous abdication of his responsibility.

       There was talk after November 6 about what the GOP should learn from their defeat, that it was a time for GOP soul searching. It's becoming apparent that they learned nothing. They will learn everything the hard way. Soon Americans are going to conclude that they only way to have an even remotely functional government is a super majority of Democrats at every level of government.-the people of Michigan are learning this lesson now, at the state level.