The Message Republicans didn’t hear

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The Message Republicans didn’t hear
President Obama campaigned on ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and won. Now he'll have to fight to do it
By Steve Kornacki


John Boehner waited until the afternoon after to speak publicly about the election, and his words conveyed one basic message: Nothing has changed.

The House speaker offered his congratulations to Barack Obama and Joe Biden and expressed his desire work productively with them. This wasn’t anything new. Americans like to hear their leaders talk about reaching across party lines to solve pressing problems, and Boehner has certainly paid his share of lip service to the idea of bipartisanship these last few years. This has always broken down, though, when the details have come into focus, which was the case once again Wednesday afternoon.

Now that the election is over, the political world’s attention is shifting to the fiscal “cliff,” a catchy term that’s a misnomer in that it suggests a sudden, catastrophic outcome if no deal is reached before scheduled tax hikes and spending cuts go into effect at the end of the year. In fact, as economist Chad Stone has argued, the cliff is really more of a slope, with the expiration of lower payroll tax rates and the Bush tax cuts and the implementation of Pentagon cuts set to gradually take effect as next year unfolds.

This is an important point, because it puts Boehner’s side at a negotiating disadvantage. For more than two decades, a bottom-line concern for the Republican Party has been opposing any and all tax rate increases, particularly for upper-income “job creators.” Not since 1990 has a single Republican member of the House or Senate voted to raise income tax rates, and Republicans spent the run-up to this week’s election vowing to keep all of the Bush rates in effect going forward. Had Mitt Romney won, they would have been able to keep this pledge, but in defeat they have no official power to do so. No matter what Republicans say or do over the next two months, all of the Bush tax cuts will go away if Democrats simply do nothing.

So the name of the game for the GOP is to create public pressure that will compel Democrats to cut some kind of deal that spares wealthy taxpayers and averts the Defense cuts that most Republicans don’t want. The problem is that Obama was just reelected after campaigning on ending the Bush rates on income over $250,000. What was striking about Bohener’s comments on Wednesday was his unwillingness to acknowledge this.

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Translated, this means that Republicans aren’t changing their posture at all. Boehner stressed that he and his fellow Republicans are open to a deal that includes new revenue, but this doesn’t quite mean what it sounds like. As the above comment indicates, the GOP remains as opposed as ever to rate hikes – especially on the wealthy, which is who the Speaker was referring to when he talked about protecting small businesses. What Boehner was endorsing was the basic tax reform framework that Romney just campaigned on and that some congressional Republicans put forward during last year’s debt ceiling drama. Their idea is to cut rates for everyone (and the wealthy especially) and then to “broaden” the tax base by closing some loopholes and ending or capping deductions. Pat Toomey, one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, floated this idea last year and a bipartisan group of senators spent this year trying to create a compromise around this framework.

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http://www.salon.com/2012/11/08/the_message_republicans_didnt_hear/