House Democrats are still good for something. They can prevent Congress from overriding presidential vetoes, even when there are enough Senate Democrats on board to sell the administration out. This is what just happened on the issue of tax-extenders, the package of tax breaks and write-offs that will expire if Congress doesn’t reauthorize them. It includes everything from corporate and small business tax credits to the American Opportunity Tax and Earned Income Tax credits.
Senate Majority Leader (for now) Harry Reid tried to cut a deal with the House Republicans that wouldn’t have protected the Democrats’ top two priorities. The administration balked. And then they rounded up enough opposition in the House to prove to Reid and the Republicans that the deal would need to be sweetened or it wasn’t going to happen. An attempt to override a veto would fail because Nancy Smash would make sure it failed.
If you interested in this topic, there are two schools of thought on Capitol Hill about the administration’s actions here. The paranoid school thinks Obama is just using progressives now to keep their leverage for later negotiations with Mitch McConnell in which progressives will be totally sold out.
The other view is that, without another election to worry about, the president is increasingly staking out more progressive positions, and that there are no indications that the administration is all that interested in a giant corporate tax reform bill anyway.
I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. A unified Republican Congress has to govern now, and that means that they have to find something to work on with the administration. Corporate tax reform is a natural for them. The administration probably wants to go into negotiations with maximum leverage even if they don’t ultimately anticipate striking a deal.
