Ezra Klein writes about ‘Obama’s bad bluff’ regarding negotiations with GOP leaders on tax cuts and giving away his hand and wearing his poker face.
Annoyed congressional staffers and baffled strategists rattle the list of concessions the White House has unilaterally made to Republicans from memory. There were the $300 billion in tax cuts, of course. The non-security discretionary spending freeze, a longtime Republican demand that the Obama administration simply announced during the 2010 State of the Union (Republicans responded by demanding discretionary spending cuts back to 2008 levels). During the climate-change debate, the administration gave away an expansion of offshore drilling, loan guarantees for nuclear power plants and delay of EPA regulations until 2011 — all Republican demands that Lindsey Graham, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman were hoping to trade for GOP support. “Obama had served the dessert before the children even promised to eat their spinach,” reported Ryan Lizza. “Graham was the only Republican negotiating on the climate bill, and now he had virtually nothing left to take to his Republican colleagues.” And most recently, there’s the two-year freeze in federal pay.
Meanwhile, House Dems are now calling the GOP bluff and promising to vote on ending Bush era tax cuts to those earning more than $250,000 a year tomorrow, except it has little chance of passing in the Senate.
But the bill, even if it passes the House, stands no chance in the Senate, which led House Minority Leader Eric Cantor Wednesday to call Democrats’ move to force a vote on the matter “nothing more than political chicanery and undermines the President’s ongoing discussions and efforts on tax rates.”
So, here we are with jobless benefits ended and a federal wage freeze and food insecurity rates rising and poverty rates rising and our elected leaders are all playing poker. Now we have Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) saying the whole lame duck session is ‘rigged’.
It is all dinner theater, I guess.
