The deal to avoid going over the so-called fiscal cliff was a lousy one: tax rate increases during a weak economy, no spending reductions, nothing on entitlement reform. And yet if House Republicans had succeeded in derailing this deal, negotiated between Senator Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden, it would have been disastrous.
It would have led to much higher tax increases on all Americans, even beyond the increase in payroll taxes that will now go into effect, and triggered decimating cuts in the defense department. And it would have done a great deal to advance the storyline that Republicans — at least House Republicans — are extremists enamored with nihilism.
I don’t believe that narrative for a moment. Most Republicans want to take meaningful steps to re-limit government, which is entirely admirable. But they faced a particularly bad set of circumstances, and it wasn’t at all clear to me what the game plan would have been if they had succeeded in blowing up the deal passed by an overwhelming margin in the Senate.
To have amended the Senate deal with the most minor spending cuts–essentially pocket change, given the level of deficits and debt we’re dealing with–would have been fiscally meaningless. And if an amended deal had led to no deal at all–which is precisely what would have happened–it would have been calamitous for House Republicans. There is simply no way Republicans could extract a good, or even mediocre, deal from this situation. They had to hope they could minimize the damage, retreat to safer and better ground, and think through a strategy on how to more effectively wage future battles with the president. Republicans can also take some comfort in the fact that Democrats, after having spent a decade demagoguing the Bush tax cuts, made them permanent for 98 percent of Americans. And as the dust settles on this deal, it may dawn on Republicans that Democrats, who presumably were in a position of maximum strength, didn’t get nearly as much as they hoped for. (For more, see Yuval Levin’s excellent analysis here.)
Congressional Republicans who wanted to amend the deal sent to them by the Senate may have been engaging in a primal scream of sorts. They are enormously (and understandably) frustrated at the president’s staggering indifference to our debt crisis and their inability to do anything about it. And because this deal is so bad in so many ways, they wanted to vote against it. But if more of them had voted the way Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Eric Cantor did, they would have badly damaged their party and their country.
I for one am glad that cooler and wiser head prevailed and that this bad deal didn’t give way to a much worse outcome. Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for in the aftermath of a damaging election loss.
The question is whether the Republicans now have the cojones to stare down Obama on the debt ceiling fight. We keep hearing the mantra of "one dollar of cuts for every dollar of debt increase". Will they stick to it? We are on a $1.2 trillion deficit pace for this year alone — even a short term, say two year, debt ceiling increase will have to be in the $2.5 trillion range. And even if we are talking about real cuts over 10 years, that is way beyond what Dems will agree to. So who is going to cave when Obama startheta demagogue the issue and markets get nervous. I think we all know the answer…
Rubio, Cantor, Issa, and the other Republicans who voted "no" didn't really do anything especially courageous or principled. They were lucky that there were enough votes to allow the bill to pass while they were free to make their demonstrations of opposition. Had the bill failed and the full tax increases gone into effect, the same members who found a $450,000. threshold with no spending cuts unacceptable would have been obliged to swallow a $250,000. limit and still no cuts later on. I have more respect for Paul Ryan; he hated the deal as much as anyone but refused to walk over Boehner to make a cheap and easy gesture of defiance.
Amen to that. It’s remarkable that Democrats settled for an income tax hike on $450k plus, a far more moderate increase in capital gains tax than they have lusted after for years, and a reasonable change in the death tax. Why is this not a huge GOP victory? Obama will want even more “revenue” in 2013 but his prospects for getting any are now slim, nearly all Dems having voted for the deal. His best chance to get a lot more was to go over the cliff and roll back only rate hikes on the ever-changing “middle class.” Republicans have protected most Americans from a big tax hike but the right wing craziness prevents them from getting any credit.
And today, we see Fox anchors and talking heads and various pundits and bloggers demagoguing the payroll tax “increase.” How is it a conservative position to oppose ending what was supposed to be a temporary holiday from 2% of the tax as part of a stimulus package? How is it consistent with years of conservative complaining about 40 % of earners paying no income tax?
Most of this crap is not principled at all.
Wehner, you would have made a great apologist for Bush 41 after he caved in 1990. This was the same thing all over again with Republicans demonstrating they have no principles and are scared of the media (as always).
My own opinion is that the Republicans who voted against the bill, and the Republicans who voted for the bill, all did the right thing.
If all or most of the Republicans had voted for the bill, voters and Obama would have concluded that the Republican party has no principles that it is willing to fight for.
On the other hand, if all or most of the Republicans (particularly in the House) had voted against the bill, it would have failed, and the economy would have been severely damaged — and although the economy may be improving somewhat, it is a long way from healthy.
When the Republicans in the Senate and in the House caucused (I think they did so separately), each senator or representative surely discovered how the Republican vote was likely to go. And they probably had at least some knowledge about how many Democrats would vote for or against the bill. So there may have been at least some Republicans who switched their position when they discovered that a majority of the House Republicans could vote against the bill, because a large majority of Democrats were voting for it.
The result was ideal: The bill passed, which avoided the short-term (and probable long-term) economic damage that would have occurred if the bill had failed. But the Republicans who voted against the bill made clear that the Republican party’s view is that Federal government spending is grossly excessive (and that the nightmare that tax law has become needs to be fixed).
In particular, House Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan, and Representative Eric Cantor and Senator Marco Rubio, all voted the right way even though they voted differently. I admire them all.
Roger Folsom