It’s because Reid doesn’t know the difference between “compromise” and “conciliation.” They both start with C, so it’s not hard to see where he’d get them confused. :rolleyes:
The leverage the Democrats have is that the tax cuts expire at the end of the year. If the Republicans block everything, the tax cuts expire for all income brackets, and we return to Clinton-era tax rates. The Republicans don’t have the votes to extend the tax cuts on income over $250,000, if it’s a separate vote. The Democrats control what bills get brought to the floor. All the Democrats need to do is not allow any votes on tax cut extensions that don’t separate the two.
Also, ideally, they’d do this before the election, so that the Republicans would go into the election either blocking the tax cut extension for all income below $250,000, or allowing the Democrats to get their way. Everything about the situation favors the Democrats, but they’re completely unwilling to take advantage of it.
The best thing that could have happened to Senate Democrats would have been for Reid to have been defeated for re-election in Nevada. Adding a wingbat Republican, and allowing Schumer or Durbin (both far more agressive than Reid) to take over leadership would have been good.
I said this before the election, when I didn’t even know if the Dems would still have a majority, and I’m saying it now, and I’ll be saying it for the next two years.
Of course he does.
He can do the right thing, instead of the easy thing.
And when the shit hits the fan, he can point right at the people who would rather shut down and bankrupt the government than see people making a million dollars a year pay their fair share of taxes.
Wait two years, and let elections take their course on the obstructors of proper government.
Sure it’d be nice if the president’s job could be easy, but it isn’t.
It’s hard.
Even our worst president, George Bush, knew that, and said so many times.
If Obama thought he was up for chief unicorn of cloud cuckoo land, he was sadly mistaken. That position belongs to Sarah Palin, or that orange guy in the house.
David Brooks, a conservative commentator, describing the current Republican Party:
What’s wrong with Brooks anyway? He’s a republican, and he has brains (and uses them). I see him often on The Newshour and he, usually at least, makes sense.
Sure you can lay the blame on Reid but he’s stuck in the position of trying to bring a bill to the floor his own party can’t be consistent on.
To me this is another failure of leadership on Obama’s part. He is the leader of the country and the defacto leader of the Democratic party. If he would stand up and tell the Congress and his own party what he expects to see on his desk, Reid wouldn’t have to try and get cloture with the moving goal posts caused by Obama’s willingness to compromise his party’s ideals away.
Mr Obama repeat after me. ‘I will veto any and all bills that include a tax cuts for anything after the first 250K worth of personal income. Doesn’t matter if a bill is passed in the lame duck session or in the next 2 years, as long as I hold the pen this will not happen.’
He’s drawn a line in the sand - not quite the same one you were after.
Sad really. Once again he’s failing to take leadership on even his own line in the sand. If that’s what he wants sure, then get the fuck out there and make that speech. Tell the American people what you want. Instead he takes his usual cowardly method of letting the pawns carry that message, by the time that message is out to the people it is blurred out and lacking in meaning.
I feel Obama has failed to step up. He keeps trying to play a game of chess, manipulating pieces here and there trying to bring his side to a victory that can’t be achieved without using all his pieces in a uniformed way. He’s not very good at herding his cats on the face of it, but an even bigger issue is he refuses to acknowledge he himself is the most powerful figure at his disposal. He isn’t just the man behind to board. He needs to get his ass on the playing field and use it to win.
Leaving congress with no clear expectations and hoping they come to the results you want is a horrible plan.
Then you look at the compromise he’s hinting at, I’ll give your side 700 billion in tax cuts if you give my side 33 billion in unemployment benefits. Yeah you really drive a hard bargain sir.
Keep a couple things in mind. First and foremost, nothing has actually happened yet. The House has passed the Bush cuts without the rich. the Senate refuses. The Pubbies are publicly bargaining to pass tax cuts for the rich in exchange for helping the unemployed.
How many new enemies have the Pubbies made in the last few weeks? Sure as hell a couple million Americans are rather cross with them. Likely to get even madder. How many of the Tea Party enthusiasts are catching on that they’ve been royally Had?
He hasn’t actually lost any of these fights yet, all there is dramatics and posturing. And every day the Pubbies look worse and worse. Didn’t Horndog Bill pull the same kind of “rope a dope” strategy, retreat, offer compromise, wait for them to step on their dicks? Now, of course, Obama isn’t Bill Clinton. But he has his phone number. Bill would probably take his calls.
Yes, let us not forget his dramatic rescue of a proper single-payer health care system on the senate floor. I know that speech brought tears to my eyes. Are you also one of the millions grateful to Mr. Obama for his leadership on that issue?
Oh, wait, he bargained single-payer away first thing, and never bothered to tell those of us who voted for him. Yeah, keep the faith, baby. This time he’ll come through, for sure.
Sorry to intrude on your Chamber of Commerce talking points about the evils of big bad Mrs. Pelosi, but the House has passed the tax cut extension without the highest income brackets. The House has passed an unemployment extension. The House has passed more than 200 bills that Harry Reid couldn’t even get to the floor for a vote. Speaker Pelosi has been incredibly effective in her job, and it is the great shame of this nation that she’s no longer going to be setting the agenda, while that piece of limp macaroni Harry Reid will be – or rather won’t be because despite his “majority” status he refuses to stand up to McConnell, Kyl & McCain’s thuggery, and won’t have Russ Feingold (and fuck you very much Wisconsin for that one!) to carry water for him any more.
Because there’s no one else left. The Democrats left in the Senate are either weak tea or considered too new or too partisan to lead. Which is ridiculous, but it’s how the Senate Dems have always done things. The Democrats could set a very new course by putting up Bob Casey, Amy Klobuchar, Barbara Mikulski, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Patty Murray, Ron Wyden or Sherrod Brown for leadership, sweeping out Reid & Durbin who have had their day and then some, but it would upset the old boy order of things too much, apparently.
**
How would they possibly ever know how desperately they’ve been Had?
**I ask that question entirely honestly. We know that Tea Party voters are Low Information Voters. They do not read newspapers or news analysis (not political, but analyst) magazines or blogs or even watch local news. They watch Fox. They have little data to work with, and what they have is skewed.
They think that Obama, not Bush, created the bank bailout. They do not know (and likely never will) that said bailout cost 1/28th of the original estimate. They do not know that most of the bailout funds have been repaid.
They think that the government took over, as in took day-to-day control of, General Motors and a bunch of banks. They bought the lies in the election cycle ads bought by the Chamber of Commerce that claimed that there has been a “government takeover of healthcare.”
They think that Obama raised their taxes when in fact, they got a tax cut via the stimulus.
They don’t understand our federal budget, and think that the way to right our sinking financial ship is to cut foreign aid (a whopping 1% of the federal budget), “welfare,” and all science funding. Because a country with a constant (growing) underclass of the desperately poor, sick and starving with no investment in technology or medical research can be a world leader.
Tea Partiers have shown that they don’t have the will to find out basic information nor the capacity to understand it when it’s in plain black and white in front of them. They live in pie in the sky fantasyland where the only thing wrong at all is that taxes are too high, period, that every tax of every sort should be cut, cut now, cut deeply, and everything “wasteful” in federal government (i.e. anything they don’t think applies to them personally) should be eliminated.
Why on earth should they feel betrayed by Republicans holding everything else hostage to tax cuts for the rich, especially when Fox is telling them every single day that Democrats believe in tax and spend, (while Republican states consistently reap the largest of the pork barrel largesse) and that the Republican tax scheme “protects job creators” (the ones that have had all these years to create jobs, but haven’t) and massages their pipe dream entrepreneurial aspirations (remember Joe the “thinking about maybe one day having enough money to buy a plumbing company, maybe” Plumber) by repeatedly calling $250k+ earners “small business people” when in fact, the vastest majority of them are anything but.
The Tea Partiers haven’t been Had, because that presumes that they had skin in the game to begin with. It’s the rest of us who’ve been Had, and not by the Tea Partiers ability to rally and get out the vote, but by the indifferent middle who threw up their hands in disgust or fear and let the Tea Partiers win the day.
If you voted for Obama in believe that he planned for Single Payer, I can only ask what Obama you know, because I don’t recall any promise whatsoever of Single Payer, only the much-maligned and also bargained away Public Option.
That’s nice. Is there anything else you can’t recall, such promises of openess, and honesty, such as promises of fighting for the middle class?
When a Dem talks the language of populism, it’s a lot like when a Pub talks Jesus, except that Democratic voters actually expect the talker to deliver on his words.
Wrong… no one needs to tell me what a worthless cunt Pelosi is. I figured that out for myself.
Wow… she passed a tax bill she knew was going nowhere a couple days ago. I’m impressed!
Maybe Obama can set the agenda now… good enough for you? He can’t hand off to Nancy anymore.
I respectfully disagree. Obama may be the de facto leader of his party, but he needs a good majority leader in the Senate, and Reid hasn’t been it. Obama can’t sign bills that aren’t on his desk, and part of the reason they’re not on his desk is because Reid can’t get them there. During the heady days of the filibuster-proof majority, Reid should have been telling them what to do, not play “Mother, may I?” and give away the store to people like Ben Nelson.
Obama has the same problem. He doesn’t understand that the process literally ends with him, that he can veto bills he doesn’t like and force the Republicans to try to get enough votes to override, which can’t happen given the current makeup. Compromising with the unreasonable doesn’t really work, but he hasn’t learned that yet.
Pelosi is a dominatrix when it comes to party discipline. She’s been remarkably effective in the House. Her counterpart in the Senate? Not so much.
You’re just sore because she jammed so much unpalatable progressivism down your throat. She’s good at it, and we applaud her for that.
More on Republican obstructionism…perhaps difficulty in passing the nuclear treaty is affecting Senator Lugar:
I don’t think Lugar (or anyone else for that matter) deserves any credit whatsoever for stating the obvious. Jackasses.
Yeah, but there’s a general asymmetry. I mean, sure, if the House and the Senate can’t agree, then nothing happens – and if the President ever vetoes what the House and Senate agree on, then nothing happens (unless, as you say, enough votes to override materialize). And so, as per high-school civics class, it’s hard for either side to do stuff. At present, the Dems actually want to do stuff, and the GOP – primarily just wants to stop them.
The exception that proves the rule is this latest bit with the tax cuts: the Dems want to keep on with the tax cuts for some taxpayers – and for once they’ve hypothetically got some bargaining power, since the GOP wants something as well (namely, to keep on with the tax cuts for all taxpayers). Of course, the GOP has plenty of situational bargaining power right back (since, again, the Dems want something too). This time, it’s actually close; the GOP can only negotiate for the win by (correctly) figuring the Dems would rather pass tax cuts for all than lose the tax cuts for some – which, again, is our system’s favored outcome: the"nothing happens" default.
But, again, the current scenario is kinda weird. It normally doesn’t much matter whether the process literally ends with Obama – not so long as one side doesn’t especially feel like engaging in that process to begin with.
The Dems have 2 ways to win the tax extension problem. If the Repubs filibuster, the Bush tax cuts die. Then the tax levels return to Clinton days. That would be good. We could pay down the deficits.
If the Repubs give in on cuts for the ridiculously wealthy, while keeping them in place for the middle class and lower, the Dems win. If the Repubs give in on the unemployment extensions while keeping all the tax Bush cuts in place, the country loses. More deficits for all to enjoy. i don’t know why the Repubs would do that unless they know who they work for and will deliver at all costs.