Most--let's make that almost all-- of the news noise has been about tax rates. The CW this past week was that GOP will cave, somehow, sometime, and there will be a middle class tax cut (or status quo) but a marginal tax hike on incomes over $250,000 per year. (The people really fighting this have incomes of over $250,000 a day or an hour, because the great bulk of their money would see a tax hike, whereas everybody else will see it only for the portion of their incomes above 25K.)
But GOPers want budget cuts as part of a package which gets complicated, and it's not altogether clear Speaker John Banal can deliver the votes for anything. There are several paths that require varying degrees of participation on his part. There's a deal. There's a backdoor of allowing (either directly or through allowing some GOPers to sign on to the discharge petition) a vote on the pending middle class tax cut from the Senate. And then there's the ultimate punt: on Jan. 1 all the Bush tax cuts expire, and on January 3 the new Congress can vote to cut m.c. taxes, leaving the 2%ers tax intact at Clinton era levels. Politically this still seems the most likely, unless Banal's power over his GOPer members has increased more than anybody knows.
The past couple of days has seen the trial balloon go up for raising Medicare eligibility age to 67 over a decade or more, as a face-saver for GOPers in a bigger deal. Bad idea. REALLY bad idea. The idea of a political maneuver to save face by penalizing seniors while not really saving all than much money is repugnant. It's symbolically a terrible move as well. It reads like a betrayal of what people voted for.
President Obama hasn't spoken to this in public but otherwise he's been firm on three basic and vital issues: cut middle class taxes, raise tax rates on the rich, and stop the nonsense of holding the world economy hostage by means of the ridiculous debt ceiling vote. By now everybody knows or should know that GOPers lie about this--it doesn't authorize new spending, it just says sure the U.S. is going to pay its bill rung up by--guess who?--Congress. Because the Executive can't spend a dime that Congress doesn't appropriate. So it's a stupid vote in the first place. And President Obama announcing this week that "I'm not going to play that game" this time is fair warning, and GOPers better take it more seriously than the media seems to so far.
What people aren't talking about are all the other components of what is about to take effect or stop taking effect on Jan.1, like the huge across-the-board cuts that includes defense, the payroll tax cut, the unemployment extension.
And then there's the Senate filibuster. When the new Congress convenes in early January, its procedures say any rule changes have to happen that first day. So whether and how to change the filibuster rule is being discussed, with little apparent agreement. The issues came together this week when Senate minor leader McC asked that the Senate immediately consider a proposal to give the President responsibility for raising the debt ceiling, because he thought the Dems didn't have the votes to pass it. But maj leader Reid agreed to an immediate vote, at which point McC filibustered his own proposal. So it goes.
This is the Senate where 38 GOPers voted against ratifying a treaty that suggests that the rest of the world follow the U.S. guidelines to bring the disabled into a tolerable public life because of some right wing apocalyptic fantasy about the UN taking their children. It ranks among the most disgraceful votes this decade, and it demonstrates just how extreme the GOP has become. Those 38 probably feel no urgency to deal with the fiscal or any other problems on Jan. 1--problems that by the way were all created by this Congress-- because the world will have ended by then, as the popular and profitable interpretation of the Mayan calendar foresees.
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