Eric Cantor is a member of the House Republican leadership and is therefore responsible for, you know, leading. We all know that rank-and-file Republicans ran for and won office on a pledge to lower, not raise, the tax burden on the rich. So, in any deal that raises taxes on the rich, the House leadership would have to provide some cover for their caucus members. But, Eric Cantor apparently has no intention of providing that cover and has pulled out of talks with the vice-president over the extension of the debt limit.
“Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue,” Cantor said. “Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting and I believe it is time for the president to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue,” he said.
Cantor said that the talks so far have established a “blueprint” for going forward.
“I believe that we have identified trillions in spending cuts, and to date, we have established a blueprint that could institute the fiscal reforms needed to start getting our fiscal house in order,” he said.
“That said, each side came into these talks with certain orders, and as it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases. There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation,” he said.
Now, we all know that the Republicans are negotiating from a starting position where there are trillions in cuts but no new taxes. But walking out of the talks over the issue indicates that the Republicans are not just unwilling, but incapable of making compromises. Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterates the point:
“So there’s one of two things going on here: Either someone on the other side has forgotten that there’s strong, bipartisan opposition in Congress to raising taxes. Or someone involved is acting in bad faith,” McConnell said.
“We’ve known from the beginning that tax hikes would be a poison pill to any debt reduction proposal.” he said.
They are going to blow up the global economy through their intransigence and unreasonableness.
Yes, I agree with Cantor. It is time for the President to speak clearly on the tax issue. He needs to get in line with the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Either many someones on both sides (but especially the Repubs) have forgotten that there’s strong, bipartisan public support to raise taxes on the wealthy. Or many someones involved are acting in bad faith.
Me, I’m thinking it’s probably not a memory issue.
I think bloggers and reporters just need to shut up about this and stay out of it. Nobody on the outside knows anything. Everything that is said publicly is some percentage complete bullshit.
We’ll just have to see. Doomerism is too easy a trap to fall into.
Yeah, just STFU and let our elite leadership take care of everything. They’ve done such a wonderful job so far, I’m sure they’ve got a cunning, secret plan we’re just not privy to.
to say nothing of the fact that this was to be the most transparent administration EVAH!!!!]
We could have avoided this by passing a budget when we had the chance, but nooooo….
Name an administration that was more transparent than this one.
Go ahead. Since it’s such a hilarious punch line to repeat that statement, it must be laughably easy to demonstrate that this has not been the most transparent administration in history.
In point of fact, you won’t be able to name any, because in point of fact, this is the most transparent administration in history.
This is like when spectacularly ill-informed people think that we didn’t actually turn over command and most of the operations in the Libya mission to NATO in a matter of “days not weeks.”
To achieve health care reform, “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process.”
Barack Obama, Town hall meeting on Aug. 21, 2008, in Chester, Va.
He did a health care summit that got out a whole list of issues and proposals. It was televised by C-Span. He technically kept that promise.
What he didn’t promise was to be transparent in his meetings with the “stakeholders”. And there’s a reason. Those of the kind of negotiations that go absolutely nowhere if folks are watching. It turns from negotiating to posturing.
And at the end he had the televised showdown with the Republicans, and he took some of their ideas and put it in his recommendations for the final bill.
Part of the outrage with the results of the bill was the fact that the process in Congress was so transparent that it was clear which Democrats were gumming up the works. It was also clear that the Republican doctors were reflecting the views of their fellow highly-paid specialists.
I don’t think you will get politicians out of “executive session” mindset at critical parts in the process.
Wait. Since when was it the President’s job to pass a budget? Remind me again which branch is supposed to have the power of the purse according to the Constitution?
May I assume that you realize that the house and senate refused to pass the budget before the 2010 election. They did the very same thing when it came to dealing with raising taxes on the rich. Again, afraid of losing their seats so they turned them back on both of these issues. They were cowards. The fault lies with them.
I must say, it still shocks to hear some complain about extending the tax cuts for a year. There seems to have been a desire to let the middle class go down the tubes so that the rich will be punished. The middle class deserved those tax breaks.
What’s more, Obama made a campaign promise to not raise taxes on the middle class as well. So the Congress put him into a position where he was going to have to break a promise and he had to push for the one that he thought was attainable and would cause the least harm.
People forget that he promised to let Bush’s tax cuts expire on the top brackets but also promised to let them continue on the lower brackets. I notice he’s been very careful about not making that same promise this time around and I think that means something. We’ll see what it means when campaign season gets underway I guess.
The middle class tax cuts are peanuts! Chump change!
I’m about as middle class as they come with annual salary of $57,486, which is pretty much the median. Three people, one salary. $800 middle class tax cut and $1000 kid credit. It wouldn’t break me to forgo them. I wouldn’t “go down the tubes”. I certainly would forgo them in order to restore the Clinton tax rates and balance the budget.
We get two grand chump change, Wall street hedge fund managers and bankers get millions. It’s not an even exchange. I fault Obama grievously for extending the Bush tax cuts. It’s going to directly cause the demise of Social Security and Medicare.
Global failure of elite leadership or not, that’s not the issue. This situation is completely unprecedented. We have nothing to go on. Nothing to inform ourselves with. When was the last time a minority opposition literally held its own country hostage like this?
The one thing we can count on is that in the end, elites hate losing money. They passed TARP. It was a trainwreck to get there, but they passed it. With literally trillions of dollars in the balance, something will fall together. So we’ll just have to see.
The Kabuki kontinues.
All Cantor is doing is trying to extract as much as possible from Democrats before passing a debt ceiling bill. Cantor hopes that Democrats will sacrifice their base enough (the real base, not the progressive part of the base) that they can run a left-flank phony campaign against Democrats.
It worked in 2010. Michelle Bachmann has already put up the framing on Medicare.
Getting the GOP to vote for taxes (not just closing loopholes, but real tax increases on the wealthy) and then savaging Republicans for raising taxes would be the Democratic equivalent.
I’m really not sure how this ends… the “we’ll take ours and you can fuck yourself” attitude of the actual leadership is so brazenly asinine that I really want to believe it can’t work.
But I have no idea how this is being reported and what the perception is of this whole thing by the general, uninformed, populace. It is a genuinely scary situation.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Trouble is, even when/if they buckle, they’ll certainly keep things on the brink as long as possible in order to keep their idiot base excited. Given the “leadership’s” level of intelligence, they’ll most likely go too far and wreck world markets just by sounding really crazy. No matter how this comes out, I can’t imagine that US credibility as a reliable actor is not already suffering deep damage that will take decades to fully repair.
And of course the blame will never be placed where it belongs, on the GOP and the corrupt plutocrats behind them. The only satisfaction will be that some of the dumber and slower plutocrats may be ensnared in their own stupid game. Maybe, if things turn out awful enough, dragged off the the nearest lamp post.
Considering the power Republicans actually wield in this country, the US credibility as a reliable actor is justified in suffering deep damage.