I don’t know what happened to this Republican’s brain, but I hope it isn’t something that happens to you:
Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) — a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, which had been the epicenter of many of Boehner’s problems — suggested that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may need to be the next GOP leader on the chopping block, particularly for his unwillingness to get rid of the Senate filibuster.
“We made a lot of promises to the American people, that if we took the Senate, that we would do certain things and those things have not been accomplished,” Salmon said in an interview with reporters. “A lot of the problems we are engaged in is because the Senate doesn’t take any action on anything and there’s nothing that any presidential candidate on our side says that will ever be realized as long as the modern-day filibuster is enacted in the way it is today.”
Even if there were no filibuster in the Senate, there would still be a presidential veto. While it’s true that the Republicans might get slightly more mileage out of their unhinged agenda if they could force the president to use his veto pen on must-pass legislation, the things that Republicans really seem to care about would not have been accomplished and will not be accomplished even without the Senate rules.
The president would still have gotten his deal with Iran, and he’ll never consent to defund Planned Parenthood or to rip up the Affordable Care Act.
At least there a few House Republicans who have an actual grasp on reality:
“To be perfectly honest with you, the results we get are probably going to be the same thing, it’s just going to be a different face,” Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) told reporters. “The natives are restless, and they want to see something change. So how much change somebody can bring about, we’ll see.”
…”We are going to have Obama as President, we are going to have Pelosi and Reid as minority leaders, and we have McConnell who continues to fail to lift the filibuster, so we’re not going to get our agenda done as it comes out of the House,” Rep. Bill Flores (R TX) told reporters Friday. “And you’re going to have a new Speaker, who is going to have to wonder if he or she is the next person to lose their head.”
Yeah, this Flores dude couldn’t help taking a shot at McConnell and the filibuster either, but he said this more as a reflection of the true situation than as some kind of belief in ponies and the secret powers of some hypothetical alternative Speaker of the House.
So, what’s going to change?
Well, the new Speaker won’t take the gavel until November, presumably after some of the more nettlesome problems facing Congress have been settled. That’s the idea, anyway, although we’ll have to see if that actually works out that way it is supposed to. You know, we’ve got to get some transportation money appropriated and lift the debt ceiling and there’s some business to be decided with the Export-Import Bank. Yeah, and an omnibus spending bill to keep the government open has to get done. So, I’m a little skeptical that will all happen before Halloween.
But, assuming it does, the next Speaker will simply be under more pressure not to do any of this next year in a sane, compromising, and timely manner. And, since the chances are that the next Speaker will still be in charge of the House in January 2017 when Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders is sworn in, we can expect more and worse of what we’ve been getting with Boehner.
The Conservative Movement will not reconcile itself to modern America and we can’t seem to sideline them.
So, the nightmare will continue and get worse.
You know, we’ve got to get some transportation money appropriated and lift the debt ceiling and there’s some business to be decided with the Export-Import Bank. Yeah, and an omnibus spending bill to keep the government open has to get done. So, I’m a little skeptical that will all happen before Halloween.
The Ex-Im Bank should be the last thing to worry about on that list. And the Democrats should not renew that crap unless they get a king’s ransom for it because the GOP will never pass a renewal on their own. Besides, it’s corporate welfare anyway. A fight between two sets of oligarchs.
Enjoying this analysis and speculative reporting from this weekend:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congressional-agenda-thrown-into-disorder-with-boehners-depar
ture/2015/09/26/51514bbc-645f-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html
Oh, dear, the TEA Party is about to be made very, very angry:
My best case scenario (I am absolutely not predicting this):
Boehner works with moderate Republicans and Democrats to pass a yearly budget or CR, and a raise of the debt ceiling that would get us through 2016. If I’m dreaming big, maybe Boehner makes the Chamber happy by placing on the floor an immigration reform Bill with a path to citizenship which is acceptable to enough House Dems to pass it.
The resultant blowing of the collective TEA Party stack would continue to push the base rightward and give the Dominionists and racists/sexists the juice they need to overcome the economic royalists and get their dream candidate elected, after losing the nomination fights in ’08 and ’12 to more conventional conservative candidates. “We’ve been losing because we haven’t nominated wingnuts. Time for one of us, one of us!!”
The wingnut GOP nominee is clobbered in the general election, giving the oligarchs the ability to say “See, we tried it your way.”
However, if Boehner worked heavily with Dems on the way out the door, his preferred successor McCarthy would have little chance of winning the election for Speaker. This is why it helps the current House majority leadership to have a quick Speaker vote.
In addition, I simply can’t believe the institutional Republicans and their business allies would wish to take an Presidential electoral loss again, even a strategical one.
I don’t like The Turtle, but he’s far smarter and oiler than Orange Glo.
Tru dat.
Cruz thinks he’s the second coming of LBJ. Just goes to show how arrogance can cause stupidity.
The second coming of LBJ? Most well-read folks of a certain age think McCarthy upon seeing and hearing Cruz. Wish that the same fate would befall him, sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile the diplomatic pieces are moving into place for the Syria end game. Netanyahu and Erdogan better pop a bowl of popcorn because if it unfolds as current trends point their interests will be likely to be taken care of so long as they don’t exert their egos.
My sense is that the key figures will be Rouhani, Sistani, Putin, Xi Jinping, Obama (low profile), someone inside Assad’s regime (and possibly Assad), King Salman (much subdued). It would not surprise me to see Pres. Joko Widodo of Indonesia play some sort of mediator role in this. (If only to educate Americans as to where 200 million Sunni Muslims have power.) The real political settlement will likely be overshadowed by Russian and Chinese missions against Russian Muslim (Chechens, Dagestanis, etc) and Chines Uighur foreign fighters currently active in Syria responding to the request (explicit or implict) of the Assad government. The collateral damage will likely be the al Quaeda and ISIS forces in Syria. This will place a Shi’ite-affiliated band between the Sunni power in the north and the Sunni powers in the south of Syria. It will stabilize Israel’s situation with its neighbors and make Netanyahu’s domestic problems increase. The Russian and Chinese presence will also deter Israel from trying to drag the US into another war. Are Putin, Xi Jinping, Khamenei, and Salman mature enough to understand the global necessity and the advantages of acting in concert to end the war in this region. I know Obama is, but will his advisors let him take the domestic political risk.
I could be wrong, but there is a clear imperative in the situation for Obama to have Syria calmed down sufficiently (with another breakthrough if possible) before the next President (likely pushed haekward) takes office.
If this happens, it will be an action that does not require the action of Congress, nor will the President’s hand be visible outside his meetings with the key heads of state. US troops in the Middle East will be forced in to ad hoc operational coordination with the Russian and Chinese troops also in the area in order to avoid a superpower conflict.
The price of stability in Syria is likely to be long-term Russian bases in northwestern Syria that function in coordination with the naval base at Tartus. I haven’t thought through the pipelinistan and Suez-Bosporus implications, but allowing Russia waterborner freedom of movement for trade or navy likely is going to be a big interest for Russia now that the neo-cons overplayed their hand by threatening Sebastapol.
A stable multipolar geopolitical system is much to be preferred to a sole-superpower system that is at the mercy of the first megalomaniac.
I raise this here because McConnell and Boehner helped create the situation that constrains the ways that the President can conduct foreign affairs and ensure national security. And that hardnosed approach has wound up losing them power that used to accrued to the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House in these matters.
So you’re saying we give up on regime change? Seems that’s where we’re headed. The Liberals would not moot this without full US consent, I’m guessing.
That leaves Putin to deal with the Daesh; they deserve each other. We settle up with the Kurds, wink at the Iranians and let Iraq descend into the partition which Biden suggested in 2006. Oh, how we howled at the time.
If the people of Iraq choose to split up into three separate countries, that’s their prerogative. Biden wanted western powers to impose it, and that’s why it was a very bad idea. If secession or chopping up countries into two or more were a simple panacea, we would have dumped the south long ago.
Sure, I wasn’t entirely serious but its on interesting historical quirk if it works out that way. I don’t think there is anything anyone can do to keep the Shi’a rump of Iraq, including Baghdad, out of Iran’s sphere of influence. That’s the price we paid for invading; and everyone knows it.
Our problem is Turkey. I really think we should step aside and let Putin deal with the Daesh; let him take the heat from the Sunnis. Perhaps then we can more deftly disengage from the House of Saud, if not the Gulf. But Russia versus the caliphate might bring Putin in direct conflict with Erdogan, whom has the ambition of an Ottoman. Erdogan is very unpredictable, and, I suspect, capable of great treachery.
Erdogan is probably like most people that rise to head of state/head of government. Once in power, they don’t want to relinquish and become a bit nutty by convincing themselves that they are so exceptional that the country needs to keep them in power.
Look at the Clintons and Bushes — first ones each spent eight years plotting their return to power by proxy. And their both still engaged in this quest eight years after an upstart snatch the ring away from Clinton.
There are legitimate reasons why Turkey, Syria, and Iran are uninterested in ceding majority Kurdish population territories to a Kurdistan, and Iraqis may not be too pleased that the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan sold off oil production rights for the sole benefit of Kurdistan. The source of too much water in the region lies within Kurdish territories for any of the countries to feel confident that their access to this resource wouldn’t change if the territory were ceded to a Kurdistan.
Imagine for a moment that Mormons had been more successful in populating Idaho, Nevada, CA central valley, AZ, and northern Mexico and for the past hundred years had been creating mayhem and demanding that all those majority Mormon populated territories be ceded to them for the new nation of Nephrite. The water, oil/gas, and mineral wealth of “Nephrite” would have been huge and the west coast would have been highly dependent on “Nephrite.” And like Mitt Romney wouldn’t hesitate to bankrupt any entity that could make “Nephrite” wealthier.
Mormons had to accommodate to US culture (no polygamy) and laws (no religious or racial discrimination against non-Mormons) if they wanted to live here and get a state where they were a majority of the population and not be discriminated against in other states. No reason, other than Kurdish intransigence and dreams of a greater Kurdistan, why Turkey, Syria, and Iran couldn’t work out some similar type of arrangement in each of their countries with Kurdish populations.
“There are legitimate reasons why Turkey, Syria, and Iran are uninterested in ceding majority Kurdish population territories to a Kurdistan…” Sure, but who’s going reunite the Kurds with metropolitan Iraq? They are accepted as de facto autonomous actors; Erdogan recently bombing their militant allies in Syria. Similarly, who can stop the Iranians from absorbing Shi’a governed Iraq into their sphere of influence? Or, contrarily, deal with Daesh? The virtual partition of Iraq seems well under way.
I’m also suggesting Erdogan is a special case of evil; a deep state fascist who uses NATO as cover for shenanigans both domestic and external. And nobody’s sweetheart. Just sayin’. I was hoping he was gone just recently but he seems to have landed on his feet.
Let’s back up a moment to 2003. What government of what country wanted nothing to do with the USG invasion of Iraq? So much so, that it refused payment of billions of dollars (in either cash or military junk) to allow overflights by the invaders aircraft? We act as if only Iraq was negatively impacted by our folly. That Iraqi refugees didn’t flow into Jordan and Syria. That the breakdown in the regions of Iraq didn’t empower Kurds to Turkey, Syria, and Iran. That Iran had no cause for concern in spite of their memories of USG facilitation of the devastating Iran-Iraq war and the continuous USG drumbeat for regime change in Iran.
Sure, but who’s going reunite the Kurds with metropolitan Iraq? Who says that is a goal or even necessary? Maybe the semi-autonomous status works well for both parties. Or maybe they’ll figure out something better for all. But Iraqi-Kurdistan has no incentive at this point to work out anything as long as they can foresee a “greater Kurdistan.”
Of course Erdogan is bombing Kurds — they are the threat to the current configuration of Turkey. KSA, Qatar, Israel, the US, and yes, Turkey have made a complete mess in Syria (and France and the UK want to ramp up their participation). In going along with this insanity, Erdogan either apparently neglected to note that this would empower the Kurds or saw it as a good opportunity to decimate some of them. Regardless if Erdogan is the second coming of Hitler and Stalin, he’ll move back to his quarter if all the other dogs are called off with the exception of some minor mop up operations to clear out the various insurgents in Syria.
Then everybody — and I do mean everybody — needs to sit down and talk, talk, talk. The issues aren’t insurmountable if the US and our allies stop acting like bulls in a china shop.
Who you are arguing with, Marie. All I’m saying is events have moved way past our immediate, decisive influence. And that Erdogan is part of the problem, not a collateral victim. As for Iran’s emerging influence:
We are ceding this space to the Iranians and I think that is probably just as well.
Should have noted in Mormons had to accommodate to US culture (no polygamy), etc. that the official agreed to accommodation wasn’t fully accepted by members.
US News Twin polygamous towns on Utah-Arizona border host memorial for 13 in family who died in flood.
That’s not entirely correct. At least not for Hildale when there’s government money to be got.
I stumbled upon this community a dozen years ago when a field employee under my supervision had to report that he had in violation of his authorized authority signed a deal with a company in Hildale. To maintain good relationships with field employees in such situations, if they made a decent enough case to me, I would cover their violation by signing onto the deal.
This case as presented fell so far short that the field guy (who I liked very much) decided to lay all the cards on the table. In his mind, it would be fine because Hildale was a close knit, polygamous community, they took care of their own, and there was no way they would fail in their obligations on this deal. No way was I going to accept any responsibility for this POS, and therefore, was left with no choice but to formally report the violation. The loss a few months later on this “can’t lose” deal was small — only a couple hundred thousand.
I strongly agree that the United States should not partition Iraq. However, if we took the United States out of the equation entirely, the people of Iraq would still not have the free prerogative to split up into three separate countries. Turkey would not accept a Kurdistan, and Iran strongly prefers that the Shia majority in Iraq have control within Iraq’s borders, more so since the most destabilizing force within the borders of Iraq has become the Sunnis fighting under ISIS.
Clinton did not, and Obama will not, leave behind foreign and military disasters that rival the disasters left them by the Bushes.
Just look at the de facto map today; Kurds, Daesh and the Shi’a rump. It’s already out of our control.
The people of Iraq would most certainly would have that prerogative. Such a decision wouldn’t change the borders for Turkey, Syria, or Iran, and therefore, it’s an internal, not external, matter for Iraq. And if any one of those three new countries waged war for more territory with Turkey, Syria, or Iran, those attacked have full authority to blast back and decimate the aggressors.
Personally, I think Iraq in the long run is better remaining united and figuring out how to peaceably and equitably get along. But it’s not my country and the people of Iraq are quite capable of figuring out what they think is best for themselves.
Turkey would go to war with Kurdistan to prevent a Kurd nation-state within current Iraq borders. Turkey has a very big army and weaponized military; they would destroy the Kurds.
Iran would not allow the Sunni minority to establish a nation-state within current Iraq borders, particularly a Sunni minority under the control of radicals. Iran has a big army and weaponized military; they would destroy ISIS before they allowed them to establish a nation-state with established borders and a real centralized government.
ISIS may be able to currently control swaths of land within the borders of the weakened Iraqi and Syrian central governments, but the surrounding majority Sunni nations will not go to war to establish a partitioned Sunni state within Iraq. In fact, ISIS frightens the nearby Sunni majority nations; they see in ISIS a threat to their established power.
Let’s finish with this: are the Iraqi Shias or Sunnis moving towards any sort of political agreement, with or without partitions? No? So a negotiated split is not in the cards anyway.
And we haven’t even gotten into the interests of other world powers; it’s not just the United States and Europe that want to maintain the current borders of Iraq.
Unsatisfactory fucking mess? God damn right. Who created it?
The Parties are not the same.
First of all, I’m not proposing this. It what I see happening on the ground based on reports from all sorts of sources. (The Netanyahu-Putin meeting seemed something of a big heads up.) I’m kinda stunned that that’s the way things seem to be heading.
This is not necessarily exclusively coming from liberal media. I’m not sure that US consent is necessary and US obstruction is not in the US interest. It’s the Kurdish price that bears watching if Russia moves and China follows; they will want some assurance that they are not the targets and some idea of the vision of the end of hostilities. Substantial autonomy, self-defense, and self-government is likely their main interests. And that means an independent armed force, not matter what sort of federative arrangements with Iraq, Syria, Turkey, or all three might remain.
Dealing with Daesh means closing the means of supply and tightening the noose of Raqaa, not letting any foreign fighters escape. If it happens we will see how good the Russian and Chinese counterinsurgency units are.
Iran and Iraq (Khamanei and Sistani) are going to have some agreements to make on their own, and those likely will extend to Syrian and Lebanese Shi’ite ayatollahs and also between Iran and Hezbollah. After all, the end state requires a band of security from Iran to Lebanon, but it also requires that sectarianism (even Iranian/Iraqi Shi’ite doctrinal differences) be suppressed within that band.
Putin has domestic work to do; China has a huge infrastructure project to get rolling and an economy to patch up. They want to get all of the instability in southwestern Asia tamped down. China has a stake in the stability of Afghanistan in enabling its New Silk Road infrastructure vision. Iran is the southern flank of that. Putin might have gotten a heads up call when Erdogan punched the Kurds instead of Daesh; instability in Turkey is not helpful to Russia’s southern territories or to the Caucausus.
The US can no longer execute regime change that does not turn to absolute chaos (if we ever could). Moreover, the US, thanks to George W, Bush’s overreach is no longer the sole superpower. Nor is NATO the strong power it was. Between mindless agression and mindless austerity the entire NATO area has sapped its former military strengths – education, technology, productive manufacturing sector, smart officer corps, skilled diplomats, positive vision of the future. The idea of total supremacy across all territories and all theaters of war (land, sea, air, space, cyberspace) has become a big boondoggle and delusion for the US military are the corrupt corporations that have been sucking the DoD tit.
If this happens as it appears, it will be the first notice worldwide that the American Century is over. That does not mean that the Chinese century is next.
Well-handled, this moment could produce an international strategic system like that from the Congress of Vienna. Time to take an inventory on who would be likely odd men out.
Big point. Congress can only sit an watch it happen.
I think the abandonment of regime change in Syria is already a fait accompli among Western thought leaders.
Also, “dealing with Daesh means closing the means of supply and tightening the noose…” but how to accomplish this without confronting Erdogan and the seemingly porous Turkish border? Ironically it puts Putin on our side in an intra-state conflict-of-interest within NATO. What a world. There are tremendous opportunities here. China staggers economically and telegraphs that she is a mere continental power by unilaterally establishing bases commanding little more than the entrance to the Yellow Sea. As for our “sapped” former military strength we still have the Navy and that’s what really counts.
It seems to me if we can overcome our meddling tendencies we might look forward to a relatively comfortable and prosperous century of foreign policy. China and Russia are each other’s problem for the foreseeable future.
grammar note: China, it, pls not she. Countries are political entities not animate. [sexist language] thnx
Any agreement to partition Iraq/Syria/Turkey will require some formal long term agreement (maybe 100 year plan) to share the oil revenues. Oil is the issue that could hold up any negotiation.
There is plentiful evidence that the Turks’ historical opposition to a Kurdistan on their border is non-negotiable.
ISIL/ISIS/Daesh does not seem to be a movement led by people who will enter into negotiations with the Iraqi Shias. I may be proven wrong about that, but they currently publicize their slaughters of Sunnis who are insufficiently “devout” and down with their radical plans. The Islamic Sate leaders don’t want part of anything; they want it all, and that desire isn’t presented as a negotiation position.
Iran will not accept a partitioned state led by radical Sunnis.
The oil would enter into the equation, but all these factors and more appear to be firmly in the way of discussions even getting down to the oil revenue.
By early next year, just about when we start paying attention to primaries and the next election we are going to have a reprise of the 2013 debacle in Congress? Or worse? Crikey. The GOP establishment is in total disarray. They’ve failed utterly. Cantor, their rain-maker, gone, Boehner, gone, McConnell, now the rear-guard, absent any protection from the House. Prospects? Dismal. Who leads this party, anyhow? Preibus? Romney? Jeb? Ailes? The guy with the microphone at a rally? It would be laughable if it did not imperil and impoverish us all.
In times of chaos the unpredictable happens; I don’t like the establishment’s chances of resurrecting the status quo. Not this year or next. And one of the candidates has his fingerprints all over this.
The firebrands in the House say Cruz leads the party. The Presidential primaries might determine a different leader of the party. Just the sort of assignment the establishment gray hairs used to send Poppy Bush’s fixer on.
Exactly. But folks are starting to take an unexpected interest in Jeb’s vital signs. I think he’s hovering at stall speed and Boehner’s resignation hasn’t helped.
“the next Speaker will still be in charge of the House in January 2017 when Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders is sworn in…”
This seems overconfident. You were also bullish on the Senatorial elections last year. Polling at this time does not point to a sure-thing blowout no matter what buffoon the Republicans nominate, and Democratic candidates have squandered early leads more than once. The enormity of the possible consequences of a GOP win leaves no room for complacency.
And yet, downticket it is all DNC complacency.
First rate comment at dKos by tallen387
Not sure we are the intended audience for the Club for Growth scorecard, but it does highlight the congressional Kochsuckers.
Thanks for sharing this. Congressman McClintock’s position atop the list with a 100% CFG voting record is interesting, given his public separation from the House Freedom Caucus.
I think it’s safe to say that the Club For Growth does not score votes on Planned Parenthood funding. Nor would I expect them to.
It’s amusing to see the long coalition between the oligarchs and the fundamentalists fraying more and more. The two sides are starting to say and do things that will make it very difficult for all of them to keep working together.
Note: the expected future Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, scores only 73%. Whereas, Jim Jordan (OH) one of the oust Boehner leaders is at 98%.
If there are any Democrats running against these high scoring vermin, they should label them Kochsuckers in their campaigns.
Income growth during economic recoveries: Pavlina Tcherneva’s chart. Worse for the bottom 90% during the first four years of the Obama administration than during any economic recovery period from 1949 to 2012. The ratio might improve when the data for 2009-2017 becomes available.
Note that from 1949 through 1979, income gains for the bottom 90% always exceeded that for the top 10% during recovery periods. However, the ratio between the two became smaller during the period. Check out when the ratio changed significantly in favor of the top 10%: a) 1954-1957 and 1958-1960; b) 1970=73; c) 1975-79. That ratio didn’t change during the 1961-1969 period. Thus, while the JFK and LBJ administrations managed to hold the disproportionate gains for the bottom 90% steady with where it was when they took office, they didn’t come close to resetting it back to where it had been during the prior DEM administration and Congress (1949-1953). There was a slight improvement during the GHWB and Clinton administrations. Quickly reversed with the GWB administration.
The steady gains in the proportion of income growth to the top 10% is a function of prior tangible wealth accumulation and with every tax cut for the top income earners, their wealth increases which in turn leads to them getting a greater share of subsequent income growth.
What actions has the Obama Adminstration taken which increased income inequality? Would income inequality have been increased further if there had been no economic stimulus, Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and other actions from the 111th Congress?
To the degree that these Laws passed by the 111th were less than 100% ideal, what were the legislative strategies available to Obama and Congress which could have made them more ideal, given that after three GOP Senators came over to pass the stimulus, there were about zero Congressional Republican votes for any of them? Given that the Republicans had Senate filibuster power for all but six months of that Congress, and that among the Senate Democrats whose votes we needed were not only Ben Nelson, Lincoln and Lieberman, but Specter as well, there were insurmountable barriers to passing the very best legislation possible. Keep in mind that the Labor movement still suffers from the filibuster blocking passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. We didn’t even have our Senator Feinstein solidly on board on EFCA.
Feel free to call this a rationalization if you wish. At least it’s rational. I’d prefer that we left the irrationality to the Repubican base.
I’ll give you one biggie (which you should have been able to figure out from my comment, and no, rationalizations aren’t rational explanations), Obama didn’t let the Bush tax cuts expire as they were supposed to do under the original legislation. Those tax cuts were a significant contributor to the top 10% increasing their proportion of income gains to almost 100%.
Your persistent need to rationalize the Obama administration’s economic performance isn’t helpful to grasp the long-term macro-economic facts and trends. That breeds complacency in the here and now. Even so-called liberal pros like Paul Krugman were gobsmacked by Piketty’s data. Saying things such as, “Guess we forgot about income/wealth inequality.” Whereas, economists such as Richard Wolff and politicians such as Bernie Sanders are like wtf did you think we’ve been screaming about for over forty years?
“Obama didn’t let the Bush tax cuts expire as they were supposed to do under the original legislation.”
Consider where we were when the Bush tax cuts were due to expire at the end of 2010. The Dems had just been slaughtered in the midterms. Among the things Republicans ran on was that Obama and the Democrats wanted to let all the Bush tax cuts expire, which would have created large tax increases on those with low and middle incomes. The economy was still bad; wage growth was even worse than it is now, and unemployment was still high. Long-term unemployment was a particularly significant problem at the time.
The President and Congressional Democrats had a lot to deal with. And they needed to conclude a deal before the Republicans took control of the House in January 2011. The Republicans had a lot of leverage, and they would have had far more leverage if a deal was not made during the lame duck session of the 111th Congress.
Your construction has it that Obama/Reid/Pelosi made no deal at all, that they just agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts. That is simply not true. They got an extension of long-term unemployment insurance, reformed the AMT to boost tax cuts to 21 million people with lower incomes, $160 billion in additional tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners, and a re-establishment of some of the estate taxes which had existed before the Bush cuts to them.
The deal was a very slight net gain in reducing economic inequality in comparison to the original Bush tax cuts. A much bigger gain in addressing economic and income inequality came with Obama’s successful negotiation in January 2013 of an ending to the Bush cuts for the brackets at $400K or above.
Was the lame duck deal, in and of itself, wise policy in the long run? No, it wasn’t. But here’s the problem your position runs into: consider all the facts I mention here. What would have been the consequences if Obama/Reid/Pelosi and their Congressional caucuses had refused to negotiate and had just let the Bush cuts expire? How would that have helped the people who were suffering the most?
Among the consequences your position must deal with are the political consequences which would have come with no deal. Because that is part of the long run as well, a very important part.
Would Obama had been re-elected, and would the Dems have taken their net gain in Congressional seats in 2012, if they had been responsible for large tax increases on low- and middle-income families at the end of 2010, and if unemployment benefits had been cut?
Where would we be right now with a President Romney and a Republican Congress?
I concede that the sequester does increase income inequality. This is true of almost all the cuts, by the way; the substantial cuts in Defense spending, while desirable as a general policy goal, does have the effect of hurting the middle-class job market. The private and public defense industry employs a lot of people. This explains why even very good Democrats like Senator Boxer have defended MIC funding which provides jobs to Californians.
A dollar spent on the real economy of public goods and services returns more than a dollar to the aggregate economy. A dollar spent on the MIC returns less than a dollar. Estimates vary as to the return on the MIC dollars, but those estimates never include what could have been done instead and what the returns would reasonably have been for the alternative. We could have done phenomenal things with the $2-4 trillion that was squandered in Iraq.
Yes, if MIC dollars are followed by outrageously expensive and counterproductive overseas military actions, our Defense investment becomes a huge driver of deficits and is less helpful to the economy, despite the fact that our large-scale wars have boosted middle-class job creation in the privite and public sectors. It’s an immoral way to run an economy, but it is historically true nonetheless.
Under the Obama Administration, we are conducting military actions which are much less expensive. (I agree that many of them are strategically counterproductive.) This is a prime part of the overall Defense budget cuts, and we no longer have the separate “emergency” line item in the budget to pay for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. If anything, our budgeting has become more honest, not less.
And we can look at the Iran nuclear deal as a particularly important demonstration of the Administration’s preference to use diplomacy when possible to solve intractable problems in foreign relations.