On Free Republic, they’re outraged about raising the debt ceiling regardless of how good the rest of the deal is.
What the Dems got was that Obama didn’t have to go back to the well again to ask for another debt increase, before his re-election. That’s actually a pretty big deal.
Because there were alternatives to getting the debt ceiling raised.
I just see this as a huge missed opportunity. There could have been this grand compromise between two sides to better the country by trimming fat from programs and putting the tax code back where it belongs. Both sides negotiating in good faith and coming up with a way to hit this problem from all angles.
Instead one side learned that if they just hold their breath long enough, the other side will capitulate. They have absolutely no reason to compromise on anything going forward.
This is why you don’t trust Democrats to do what they promise:
http://news.yahoo.com/lawmakers-close-deal-avoid-default-004006145.html
[QUOTE=The Article]
The White House sees the issue otherwise. If tax reform does not succeed in the new committee, President Barack Obama will allow tax cuts put forward by former President George W. Bush to expire in 2013, White House officials said.
[/QUOTE]
Already? It hasn’t even been voted on, but they are changing the deal already? The committee is going to make spending cuts. Not tax increases. This is bait and switch if true.
It’s helpful to remember that this was not a negotiation, this was a resolution to a hostage situation. According to the movies, talking down a hostage taker involves avoiding any negation of his position until you remove the victim from harm’s way.
In this case, the Republicans were willing to shoot the country in the head. Hopefully, they’ll be taken into custody before they can hurt anyone else ever again.
But, again, it’s like there was a secret trap door under the hostage that would have saved him by invoking the 14th amendment. I think if after Boehner’s original plan failed to get through the House last week because he couldn’t get the Tea Party guys on board, Obama had taken to the airwaves and said, “See, they have a group of zealots that is so intransigent that they can’t even compromise with themselves. I have to take extreme measures,” that yes, predictably Foxnews would call him a tyrant. But, I think it would have exposed the zealotry, fixed the problem and even been a long term political win.
I’m REALLY hoping that there is a chess move down the road that Obama sees that is hidden. I’m holding out some hope for that.
I’m not so sure about this point. If I’m reading this right, Boehner is saying it will be hard for the commission to recommend an increase to taxes, and claiming victory based on that. The White House seems adamant that the commission is going to consider tax increases: Link.
There is nothing in the 14th Amendment that can be invoked by the President. If the President wanted to save the Constitution by violating the Constitution, that’s one thing, but the idea that the President has the legal authority to raise the debt limit by himself is at best a negotiating tactic, and at worst an impeachable offense.
I find you faith in corporate America endearing. I’m only familar with the IT world, but people seldom seem to be fired for failure - they just reorganize and try the next big thing.
I don’t see how interpreting the Constitution differently than the Republicans, particularly when a significant number of Constitutional lawyers agree with that interpretation, could possibly rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Not saying he wouldn’t have been impeached by the House, just saying that they would have looked like even bigger fools doing it.
That is pretty much all he got. I think his political calculus was that going through this stupid debate again would be counterproductive and make the next election a mess. He wanted to put it in his rearview mirror and go ahead to a more intelligent political debate in the future. He overestimated the baggers. The depth of their stupidity is boundless.
Obama had the people in back of him wanting taxes raised to actually cut the deficits. But the baggers would have thought that was unAmerican. A good American spends a lifetime escaping as many taxes as possible. There is no responsibility for the government. It is a life of micro-economics, trumping macro.
The will of the people was not the big deal. It was calculating the best bill he could get through to save the economy. from default. It was a terrible deal. The baggers would not yield.
They key point is leverage, IMO. In this negotiation, the leverage was the debt limit, and the potential catastrophe posed by it. Democrats had more incentive to compromise, because the far-right parts of the GOP were fine with default. I don’t think it’s a terrible compromise, in that light. It’s somewhere between Reid and Boehner, with a little McConnell thrown in.
The next round, however, will not have this hanging threat over it. Instead, it will have the trigger mechanism - which, as far as anybody knows at this point, includes defense cuts and Medicare repayment cuts. This is a much more balanced leverage point, in that both parties will have a reason to want to avoid the triggers.
The final piece of leverage, however, is the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. All Obama has to do is tie their renewal to reform of the tax code and we’re right back where we are today, but looking only at revenue instead of spending. And a failure to compromise results in a return to Clinton-era tax breaks.
I would say that had Obama taken the view that the President could unilaterally steal a legislative power from the Congress, I would support his removal from office. This is exactly the sort of thing that we on this side of the fence freaked out about when George Bush issued signing statements on hundreds of different subjects: the idea that the President can use some flimsy, non-specific phrase in the Constitution to justify saving the country from the laws that Congress passes.
Two things that I give Obama an enormous amount of credit for an that also shows he is a good man: 1) He did not attempt the so called 14th amendment nonsense usurping the power of Congress. He ruled that out immediately as he should have. 2) He also didn’t entertain the asanine platinum trillion dollar coin idea.
Well, I guess that Boehner is pulling the bait and switch. He is selling the deal to the GOP caucus as “no tax increases” when there very well could be some coming from the commission.
So spending cuts and tax increases are on the table for this commission. Did they solve anything except the debt limit increase? I would ask the Dems who are upset: What have the Dems given up in compromise here?
IF Obama had decided that allowing default was a horrible disaster that would crash the world economy, he has to give in. The Repubs work for the wealthy and they could not cave. The baggers are too stupid to understand the impact of their philosophy.
So Obama had to make the decision . It was terrible, but he did it to save the economy.
The use of the 14th amendment , was legal. It exists for a reason. But its use would have made the baggers even crazier. It would have given the Repubs useful fodder for the next election. It may have been disruptive and made governing in the future impossible. We would have done nothing else but fight that battle in the press .
It could have at least been used in negotiations, but it was taken off the table. I get the idea behind doing that in a game of chicken, but I think it should have been used.
Is this the commission of equal parts Dem Senators, GOP Senators, Dem Representatives, and GOP Representatives?
By the way, can we please stop referring to the amendment the Republicans are proposing as a balanced budget amendment? Even if we were to stipulate for the sake of argument that a balanced budget amendment were a good thing, that’s not what they’re offering. There are only two ways to balance the budget, one of which is already politically impossible, and the amendment in question would also make the other one politically impossible. If anything, it’d guarantee that we couldn’t balance the budget.
I agree with just about everything you said, but I’m not sure what you mean here. It seems to me that raising taxes and cutting entitlements are equally politically challenging right now, and the BBA would make raising taxes literally impossible. I’m just not clear what you think the BBA would “make” politically impossible…
It appears there are two BBA’s afoot. The more odious has a special provision demanding that a 2/3 superdupermajority be requiered for any tax rise. This has no chance of being passed and rat ified. The second simply demands a balanced budget, but makes no mention of the supermajority. This version, by comparison, has no chance of being passed and ratified.