It’s almost unbelievable that the Democrats could take their strongest issue, tax-breaks for millionaires and billionaires, and not only fail to use it before they adjourned, but to actually let themselves get hammered for not protecting the middle class tax cuts.
House Democratic leaders barely headed off a revolt Wednesday from 39 moderate Democrats who sided with Republicans and voted against a procedural resolution that would let Congress adjourn before the midterm elections.
GOP leaders framed the measure as a de facto vote on agreeing to leave Washington without voting on whether to extend the Bush-era tax cuts due to expire at the end of the year. The Democrats who split with their party face tough re-election battles and didn’t want to give the GOP a political talking point by going on record that they were ready to leave without taking up the issue.The measure ultimately passed 210-209, allowing Congress to officially leave town after it finishes business likely late Wednesday night. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who rarely votes on these routine resolutions, had to step in and break the tie.
I mean, are you fucking kidding me? And don’t blame the progressives for this one. They were literally begging the Blue Dogs to save themselves and allow a vote to extend the tax cuts for the middle class.
Here you have a bunch of Blue Dogs who are afraid to vote for a bill that would preserve tax cuts for 97% of Americans and probably 99% of their constituents. And what do they get instead? They get blasted for being a member of a party that is letting those tax cuts expire. “No, no,” they’ll say, “I voted against adjourning without addressing that.” Yeah, technically you did, but only after you told Pelosi she couldn’t have your vote if she did try to address it. So, in addition to being cowards, you’ll now be parsing liars. Congratulations. You just pissed off your own base, 99% of your constituents, and lost the chance to be a populist hero in the bargain. You so deserve to lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage payments. These people are unimaginable idiots.
And why do Blue Dogs behave this way? Is it because they need the Chamber of Commerce to go easy on them? Is it because they can’t raise enough cash in their own districts to compete with the Chamber of Commerce, so they have to vote like banksters? You’re a Democrat serving in a socially conservative district. If you give up on taking the side of the people against billionaires, what do you have left? Where’s your appeal? If you are representing hordes of poor white Christian folk who are living on welfare, or check-to-check, how are you going to win their votes by siding with the New Jersey-Connecticut investment banker set?
So, you figure you’ll just build up a large enough war chest from out-of-state corporate cash, neuter the Chamber’s wrath by voting with them, maybe pick-up a NRA endorsement along the way, and the people will keep electing you. Well, not this year. The Blue Dogs are going to get decimated. There may not be more than a small handful of them left in the South when this is all over.
And the crazy thing is that any one with eyes could see that they were tying their own noose. Progressives tried to reason with them and they shot themselves in the face anyway.
It’s just beyond words.
they’re a bunch of mealy-mouth muthafuckas that don’t stand for shyt.
and, when they get beat, no better for them, for not standing up for anything.
hey, they stand for tax cuts for the rich that make a joke out of their famed love of balanced budgets.
Byron Dorgan is for serial, though:
I agree with that. Completely. Obama has the advantage that keeping his campaign promise on taxes is good policy and obviously popular. But it’s only good policy in the short-term. as a stimulus. More accurately, raises taxes on the middle class and working poor would be anti-stimulative. So, it makes sense to extend them, but not to make them permanent.
I agree, too, which is why I like the way Obama framed this issue. Let them compromise around this.
Hmm, does this make us deficit hawks, BooMan?
I’m a deficit hawk. Definitely. If you keep a balanced budget then you are prepared for downturns when you need to spend. Nothing infuriates me more than a tax dollar going to pay for interest on debt. You do it when you have to, but only an idiot runs a country that way. I’d slash military spending by closing our overseas bases in as many places as possible, eliminating needless weapons acquisitions, and reducing the overall size of the armed forces. I’d also increase the tax rate on dividends, capital gains, the Estate Tax, and the marginal tax rate. In return, I’d either eliminate sin taxes or make sure that sin tax revenue went directly to reducing sin.
We can pay for our government a lot more painlessly than people realize, and we can reduce our spending substantially without hurting too many people.
If you’re a deficit hawk, how can we afford 3 trillion dollars in tax cuts?
BooMån, you make eminent common sense. When you put it that way, I’m a deficit hawk too. Let’s close those bases overseas, especially the ones in Germany with all those great golf courses for the military brass. And, can we finally get our guys out of Okinawa? The natives, for the most part, will be overjoyed.
I’m a Keynesian. When the economy is bad and only when the economy is bad, you create deficits to get the economy moving. When the economy is good, you create surpluses and pay down debt to take the froth out of the economy without choking off investment (not the paper shuffling kind). That’s the Keynesian part.
Furthermore, you don’t cut taxes until the debt is zero. That principle prevents the sort of raiding that Bush did.
If you have a war, you impose domestic price controls on items needed for the war effort. If there are serious shortages, you ration. That breaks people of thinking that war is a quick-fix solution to economic problems. If you run a deficit, you keep price controls on until the war deficit is paid down. That prevents businesses from seeing postwar shortages as a ticket to unearned income.
When you run a deficit to stimulate the economy, you invest in assets – tangible like infrastructure, intangible like research – that lower the cost of doing business.
You use actuarial methods to calculate the risk of emergencies and downturns and set aside a “rainy day fund” to delay the necessity of deficit spending for minor adjustments or natural disaster recovery.
You have a dollar budget and a taxpayer-equivalent budget to make decisions among program priorities. In 2009, the average individual tax payment was $8157. The salary (not total compensation) for a US Senator was $174,000. The taxpayer-equivalent expenditure for the salary of one senator was 21 taxpayers. There were a total of 144 million or so taxpayers. The taxpayer-equivalent budget balances when the sum of the taxpayer-equivalents for each budget item equals the total number of taxpayers. The advantage of this method is that it clearly identifies the impact and priorities. For example it takes 67,892,607 taxpayers to pay for the 2010 Defense budget. That’s approaching half of the total number of individual taxpayers. But reporting of the size of the military budget is that it is 20% of the 2010 US budget, which is true. And yes, it does take 1050 individual taxpayers to support just the salaries of the total US Senate.
For corporate income taxes, you set the rate as some percent times the multiple that the highest compensated person in the corporation is of the US minimum wage. This allows corporations to decide their tax rate to a certain extent by adjusting their salary structure.
The most important 5 words in that post are:
“out-of-state corporate cash”
It is likely that 20 or so of those 39 will not be re-elected or have already retired.
Blue Dogs behave this way to show their independence of the “liberal Democratic leadership” and how they “look out for the people of the XXX district of STATE”.
This folks (unfortunately not all of them) are where Democrats are vulnerable in November. A pure defensive hold-the-seats strategy will not keep the majority. Democrats must aggressively go after up to 30 or 40 Republican seats to put pressure on Republican resources if nothing else. And they must target a number of the symbolic crazies plus John Boehner and go after them like Republicans went after Tom Daschle in 2002.
As for tying their own noose, they tied it on health care reform and on climate change by weakening the bill so that it cost more and delivered less or regulated less and gave away more to private corporations. In their districts, their opponents are running against all Democrats and ignoring the fact that they voted with the Republicans so much.
Well, no shit.
This is a fact the obviousness of which you simply cannot convince conservative Democrats.
it really is amazing isn’t it? they keep running the same bad play.
What is Hoyer’s role in all of this? This is do or die time for these politicians and his advice to them is to duck a base issue in a base election and vote with Republicans? And I am not starting the Rahm BS debate but why is he not getting these people, many who he hand picked, to realize this might be the only issue that will rescue them? I guess he has bigger issues in Chitown.
Hoyer’s real has been to stab Pelosi in the back all along. Even before Emanuel left the House, he was a champion of the Blue Dogs. Now that Emanuel is gone, Hoyer is the leader supreme of said Blue Dogs. Hoyer obviously thinks he’ll be the next Minority Leader. Will he have enough votes if the Blue Dogs get slaughtered? I don’t know.
What they’re thinking is that they’re eventually they’ll lose an election – maybe this year, maybe in two years, maybe four – and then they’ll need a job. A nice job where they can make six figures. With their experience about the only kind of job like that they can get hired for is “lobbyist” and so they don’t want to piss off anyone who might be in the position to hand them a six-figure job after they leave office. None of the Blue Dogs are expecting to be lifers in Congress – their districts are too unstable for them to be able to do that – so they vote conservative both out of a desire to get re-elected or, failing that, as a best path towards being able to maintain their lifestyles after losing their jobs in Congress.
It’s not cowardice or stupidity with the Blue Dogs – it’s self interest.
A new CNN poll shows remarkably high support for Scott Lee Cohen in Illinois and also for the Green Party candidate for Senator. Cohen is not a Green. He was the former self-financed candidate for Lt. Governor who won the Democratic Primary but was forced off the ticket when Quinn and Madigan (the hand up Quinn’s ass) decided he would hurt Quinn’s chances. He is now running an independent campaign. While Quinn and Brady throw mud at each other, Cohen’s ads focus on jobs in Illinois. Have these people become so insulated from the economy that they no longer connect with the voters?
“Is it because they can’t raise enough cash in their own districts to compete with the Chamber of Commerce, so they have to vote like banksters?”
Um, yeah. Duh. I thought that was obvious.
Since our Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech (long before Citizen’s United, by the way), we have a system in which Congress represents dollars, not people. This is especially the case in swing districts, where you can’t win a clear majority just by being liberal or conservative, so campaigns actually matter.
Except that doesn’t explain the geographical distribution of Blue Dogs, who are primarily from rural or small town districts. Their positions tend to be economic capitulation and culture-war straddle.
I think it does explain it, though. If you’re a dem from a rural district, you are already running upstream on cultural issues. This makes out-of-district campaign money even more important to you.
Dems from urban districts can afford to be more left-wing in their economic votes, because they know their constituents are with them on cultural issues (including, in many cases, the cultural issue of whether anyone besides a white male is a person).