Here Goes, Well, Nothing

Ezra:

Mitch McConnell’s threat to fil­i­buster lit­er­ally every­thing Democ­rats want to do until Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans agree to a com­pro­mise on the Bush tax cuts can be read as a power play, but it can also be read as a dare: At this point, Repub­li­cans are sure that they can abuse the rules as much as they’d like and Democ­rats won’t dare do a thing about it. McConnell’s blan­ket fil­i­buster now joins Richard Shelby’s blan­ket hold as the two most egre­gious acts of pro­ce­dural brinkman­ship in a Con­gress that’s been chock-​​full of rules-​​based obstruction.

Democ­rats can and should win this. For once, Democ­rats are the ones who win the day if no action is taken. No mat­ter how much any Demo­c­rat would like to extend the lower-​​end tax breaks, it would not be a loss if we allowed all the breaks to expire. Imme­di­ately, we would have solved a huge por­tion of the short-​​term deficit prob­lem, and could blame Repub­li­cans (who most of Amer­ica prob­a­bly thinks holds the major­ity already) for the fail­ure to extend Bush rates.

In fact, it would be well with in the power of any Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­tor who shares such a view to ensure that this hap­pened — he or she would just have to fil­i­buster the vote them­selves! Unfor­tu­nately, there is nobody any­where within the Demo­c­ra­tic Party who can craft a use­ful nar­ra­tive on this story, and that’s why we’re going to con­tinue los­ing these things. It would have been just lovely to see Democ­rats steal the deficit wind from Repub­li­cans by refus­ing to extend the tax cuts and basi­cally screw them well into next year.

Oh, and by the way, did we notice that Democ­rats passed another majorly awe­some reform bill today? (Majorly awe­some, of course, because it made me aware that “Pizza Mar­ket­ing Quar­terly” is free online).

2 December 2010 – 2:54 am | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Federal Budget | Tagged , , , , | Comments (189)