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While Harry Reid didn’t commit to a vote on the President’s proposal for a one-year extension of tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income, on the other front where the President differed with some in the Democratic Congressional leadership, the Congresscritters appear to be bowing to the leader of the party. Chuck Schumer, who has led the effort to re-define “middle-class tax cuts” as anything under $1 million in annual income, has declared himself satisfied with the $250,000 strategy.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y) — who had pushed hard for letting tax cuts lapse for millionaires at year’s end – has agreed to back President Barack Obama’s plan to impose hikes on families earning more than $250,000, quashing what might have been an election-year Democratic food fight.
Obama’s team quietly pressed top Hill Democrats last month to back the plan in a series of White House meetings people close to the situation tell POLITICO.
“[Schumer] still believes that the millionaire strategy is the best one. But he believes more that party unity at this time is even more important,” said a person close to Schumer told POLITICO, who emphasized that any daylight between the White House and Hill Democrats was tactical, not philosophical.
“He’s going to be a team player for the president.”
Similarly, Nancy Pelosi, who abruptly shifted to the $1 million dividing line earlier this year, acquiesced to the Obama plan, saying nothing about the controversy in her supportive statement released today. The White House and Democratic aides confirmed that the two sides conferred before the announcement.
Schumer and Pelosi will tell you that their change was all about tactics and marketing, that a $1 million dividing line was an easier sell to the public. This smacks of the old Pauline Kael line about how nobody she knew voted for Nixon. To the ordinary American, $250,000 in annual income sounds like a pretty big number. People don’t need a rounder figure to understand the point of letting tax cuts expire for the wealthy.
Now that the dividing line has been re-set, the bigger question is whether or not a strategy with a dividing line is doomed to fail. Republicans know they have leverage if they just vow to not split the tax cuts, only extending those for people making under $250,000 if accompanies by the tax cuts for people making over $250,000. The only way to break that leverage is by declaring it an all-or-nothing deal, and vowing to let all the Bush tax cuts expire if the first-priority option does not succeed. At that point, if they all expire, the Democrats could come back with “Obama tax cuts” in 2013 (provided he’s still President). But that’s really the only way tax rates rise on those wealthy earners. Otherwise, Republicans will be content to block any effort to split things out.
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Obama and the dems are dancing the dance of election-year bullshit.
I will be surprised if the republicans prove to be afraid of much of anything that they’re doing as we head into the last of Obama’s first and perhaps only, term in office. All of these “fights” are governed by one unspinnable fact:
In the time when he had huge margins in both houses of congress, Barack Obama’s relationship with the republicans was that of a well-trained poodle to his master. I will be pleased to read the arguments and “evidence” that he is going to do anything but talk, about changing…and not much of that.
Gee, when ya got a GIANT CROOK like Chuck Schumer on your side….
The only thing more pathetic than the corporate puppets masquerading as “Democrats” is the slavish devotion of those who support them.
….it means that you’ve got the support of Wall Street and AIPAC/Israel.
Isn’t the alternative so much worse? Voting Green is a lost cause. This country doesn’t have the time for a “green revolution” to take place.
Much of the dissatisfaction with the Dems is an age thing. The younger voters are more impatient, while those of us older who have seen the “bum of the month” club every election cycle know that you can’t destroy the edifice that the 1% have constructed – you can only chew away at it on the outer edges and acept the crumbs they want to throw out.
No. A President with a “D” next to his name is free to initiate more “kinetic military actions”, not enact regulations, and destroy the social safety net without even the token opposition from the “Democratic Party”. But please, feel free to rationalize your support for O. After all, it’s appropriate that a neoliberal sporting the “D” brand should be the one to destroy the programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. It was another corporatist with a “D” designation who signed the act that repealed Glass/Steagall.
If they are smart they will point out that 5 times the median income in this country is plenty wealthy.
It’s a lost cause as long as people continue to choose between bad and worse. I can’t think of a better year to vote your conscience and voting more of the same certainly isn’t going to be less of a time waster in terms of “revolution” then voting green or another party besides the Uniparty that parades around as 2 different options.
Can I get an amen?
1. The Obama LLC/Schumer feint is $250,000
2. Obama LLC(CAVEMAN)/Pelosi line is $1,000,000 and
3. Final is Bushco tax cut extension through 2016
Can I get an amen on that?
Maybe all you can hope for then is that Willard and the GOP control all the levers of power to push us off the cliff, and then you can help re-build it into something different. What you would need is an OWS movement of monumental proportions to destroy the whole rotting edifice. The odds of that happening are about 10,000 to 1. Tens of thousands of lives will have to be destroyed first due to inadequate healthcare coverage, but if you’re going to make chicken soup someone has to kill the chicken.
Many people say that they “vote their conscience” but that doesn’t change squat in any election cycle. You’d need about 100 million people plus to vote their conscience, but most people, human nature being as it is, vote in their self interest, or what they perceive as their self interest, like blue collar workers who regularly vote for the GOP. At least 33-40% of the electorate are still scared sh****ss or resentful of the “other.” How are you going to turn them around?
We’re already off the cliff and plummeting. Anything that accelerates the demise of the Empire is preferable to the frog-in-pot cycle we’re experiencing now.
I agree. I actually had to sit and listen to a trad-Dem friend of mine PRAISE the Roberts’ SCOTUS “decision” on ACA. I was gagging, but given the circumstances, it just wasn’t the moment to inform my pal that she’d been royally HAD by what was a very bought-off “decision” that inures mainly to the benefit of the 1%.
Anyone who thinks that we’re aren’t already plummeting off the cliff just isn’t paying attention or gets much mis-information and outright lies from various propoganda outlets. Continuing to vote for he who sucks less will get us just as surely in the shitter as he who sucks more.
Sometimes, you just break me up!!
They love to give you the “mean”. What I don’t hear is the average, which will be cosiderably less.
It doesn’t change squat because you hae a bunch of people afraid of not being on the winning red jersey blue jersey team. For years I heard how electing a senator was impossible and yet the impossible became probable because people chose to vote for a previous senator. It works the same way with any other scenario. Whining about options isn’t going to change things. Only action, drive and the will to choose something other than the two options offered up to us by corporate America will.
I know. I AM a riot. I’m pretty sure the Democrats couldn’t find their way out of a wet paper bag. Of course, it’s a willfull ignorance because they sure are capable when it comes to screwing over the constituensies they say they represent.
Yet that Pres with an R next to their name needs a D dominated congress to have checks on them. A R Pres and an R congress will be a real clusterfuckapalooza barely imaginable.