Well, there you have it: a bumbling, humiliating performance by the House GOP on the ridiculous two-month payroll-tax moratorium (which, among its other shortcomings, is so idiotically brief that it presents costly problems to payroll processors). Nice work, guys.
Charles Krauthammer offers a scathing summary here.
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For sheer fun, you just can’t beat Schadenfreude. Nothing like watching the Weeper of the House eating humble pie due to the pig-headedness of his caucus.
This clip is for you, John!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYJyVEUaC4
Well, you have every reason to gloat, Peter. Your man won that round.
I don’t view it that way. It’s also a victory for McConnell and his caucus. Nor do I dislike Boehner: I think he’s a decent guy stuck in an untenable position. He smokes, drinks, and golfs, so he can’t be all bad. (Also, as Obama noted regarding Boehner’s perpetual tan, he is also a person of color.) The ultimate result of the sausage making is a bad bill. So it’s nothing to gloat about, even if His Awesomeness scored some political points.
I view it as a victory of governance over nihilism. The anchor around Boehner’s neck is a Tea Party caucus which is unreasonable, inflexible, and more than eager to hold the economy hostage to force the other two branches of government to accept its agenda. Despite all of the Sturm und Drang, the only things the Tea Party caucus accomplished this year was a credit downgrade and a one year extension for incandescent light bulbs. Rather than confront our nation’s problems with serious legislation, instead we got an unending stream of ideologically driven bills on things like abortion and shutting down the EPA which everyone knew would never be passed by the Senate or escape a Presidential veto. All theater, no governance. It is gratifying to see them get their comeuppance.
Well, I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of the tea Party here.
The issue this time around was that Boehner wanted a one-year extension, which arguably made a lot more sense (two months is just absurd; at least make it three). But it was the wrong hill to die on.
Regarding Boehner’s claim that he wanted a one year bill:
If (the GOP) really wanted a yearlong extension, they would have done it long ago. The only reason the parties agreed to a two-month extension rather than a year is that Republicans complicated the negotiations by adding unrelated demands, like expedited approval of the Keystone pipeline and unrelated spending cuts. (They have never maintained that income tax cuts, which benefit the rich far more than cuts in the regressive payroll tax, require spending cut offsets.) The payroll tax became a hostage exercise, and the only way to beat the deadline and avoid at least a temporary expiration was to approve a short-term extension to buy time to negotiate the party’s own hostage demands. But this time Democrats refused to hand over the ransom.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/12/suicidal-house-republicans.html
But whatever: it’s over, just a momentary respite in the daily follies known as the American political system.
Let me put that another way (I had already seen Chait’s piece, but thanks for the link): Boehner still wanted a one-year extension rather than the idiotic two-month one the upper chamber had agreed to in order to get the other things they thought worth fighting for, like the expedited pipeline decision. (As Krauthammer asks re the two-month extension: What genius came up with that?)
As I said, your man won that round.
Chait gets this right:
Hence the title of this post.
“It is gratifying to see them get their comeuppance.”
No matter the cost?
Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead and nevermind that iceberg?
As if …
Serious legislation from the idiots who gave us that dollop of dreck “Obamacare”?