Update:
Politico reports that House Republicans have struck a deal with Senate Democrats to extend the payroll tax holiday for two months, while negotiating a one year extension:
The capitulation came fast Thursday afternoon as House Republicans found themselves increasingly isolated in insisting that a full one-year extension was the only solution to the year-end crisis. The end of this debate will also come quickly — the House and Senate are expected to clear the legislation on a voice vote Friday morning
In announcing the deal Thursday evening, Speaker John Boehner said Republicans had won new provisions that would protect businesses from certain payroll reporting requirements. Republicans also got Democrats to agree to accelerate the meeting of a joint House-Senate conference committee to negotiate a full-year deal.
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Speaker John Boehner apparently has no pride whatsoever. Having failed to get Harry Reid to name anyone to a House-Senate conference committee to work out a deal to extend the payroll tax holiday, unemployment benefits, and doc fix for a year rather than force a House vote on the two month extension passed by the Senate, Boehner is now groveling beneath President Obama begging him to save the Republicans from their own stupidity.
The Speaker is a damsel in distress and Snidely Whiplash appears to have the upper hand.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, phoned President Obama this morning and asked him to send members of his economic team to the Capitol to end the political stalemate and negotiate a path toward a one-year extension of the payroll tax credit. The president declined the offer.
“With Sen. Reid having declined to call his members back to Washington this week to join the House in negotiating a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, the speaker proposed that the president send members of his economic policy team up to Congress to find a way to accommodate the president’s full-year request,” a senior aide to the speaker said. “The speaker explained his concern that flaws in the Senate-passed bill will be unworkable for many small-business job creators. He reiterated that if their shared goal is a one-year bill, there is no reason an agreement cannot be reached before year’s end. The president declined the speaker’s offer.”
According to the White House, the president told Boehner “the only viable option” is the two-month extension, but Obama “is committed to begin working immediately on a full-year agreement once the House passes the bipartisan Senate compromise that prevents a tax hike on 160 million Americans on Jan. 1.”
Technically, Boehner is right. The scheme is indeed, unnecessarily complex and nearly unworkable.
But technicalities don’t mean squat when you’re in a political fight and you’re holding a pair of deuces while your opponent is flashing three queens. The Democrats, including the president, are following one of the oldest political maxims in history: Don’t get in the way when your opponent is in the process of destroying themselves.
It appears that the GOP is no longer a political party. Their members have bolted and decided to join the Hemlock Society.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!!
The good old GOP motto!
What victory do you all imagine was destroyed at the last minute? Neither Boehner, the GOP, or America can have any victory before 2012.
This just shows how uninterested in fixing anything the Democrats are.
This is their bad.
The American small businessman and businesswoman have been dealt lemons.
Peel the zest off them.
Take EVERY instance of confusion, corruption, chaos…and throw it back in Obama and Reid’s lap.
Parade the catastrophe right to their doorstep. Highlight it, personalize it…let them own it.
The short term benefits should be completely obliterated by the long term detriments. The wages of small c communism is fiscal death for the free market.
The republicans are too stupid to do that.
The transfer of revenues from the Social Security “Trust” to younger workers is one of the nuttiest pages in the tome that is our history, and the cowboy poet harry Reid can sure take a lot of credit for it…I reckon. So can his ramrod Obama. Obama: You must cut it to two months’ worth so later we can make it a year’s worth and I’m going to start working on that year’as worth immediately. (Coo coo! Coo coo!)
Fox News certainly let us down yesterday. They kept using the Orwellian phrase “payroll tax cut” to describe this fund transfer. (AARP, where are you, you communist flunkies?) Fox’s dream team agreed only on one thing, the new Congress members were wrong even if they were right. Same for the two wisemen who were replacing Rush and his competition (who were away in Hawaii one supposes) in the same time slot on the radio. Callers tried to explain the fallacies and half truths of the President and other Dems to these substitutes. They could only answer ‘Sure, you are right but you seem like you are wrong.’ I guess in politics as seen by the media seem beats is every time.
Meanwhile, none of the big media are reporting the obvious. Since we pulled our military out of Iraq, more people are being murdered. Obama owns this lock, stock, and barrel. He and Reid are also going to own the SS going broke sooner.
This just goes to show how inept Boehner is as Speaker. Before you pass a bill in the House, you really should privately run it by the Senate first, if you are seriously trying to get it done. If you show them the courtesy of this, they are less likely to be obstreperous about it. Yes, I know they are Dems playing politically stupid games, but they are still human beings who react to human gestures. Everyone wants a little respect.
He also has this tendency to try to make a deal, then gets spanked by the Tea-Partiers in the House and gets sent back to the negotiating table. Then, he looks like a doofus to the other side, and the proceedings seem like a complete waste of time to them, because he cannot back up his agreements.
He is completely out of touch. He really does not understand or is dismissive of, the very real convictions of the Conservatives in the House. He keeps trying to do business as usual, and they keep spanking him for it. And he never effing learns. He keeps seeing them as isolated instances, instead of a pattern.
If you want to see how to do it, look at Eric Cantor. He invited Obama to come and meet and resolve the deadlock. He stated, “We are really not that far apart, and we could resolve our differences in an hour.” Obama likely won’t do it, but Cantor is putting the ball back into Obama’s court. Boehner just hits it into the net every time.
It is time for Boehner to step down, or for him to be brought down. It is time for a new Speaker.
Let’s get Cantor as Speaker. Let’s get Bachmann to stop running for President and make her the Whip, where she belongs. That would have a salutary effect on the elections, as it would winnow the Conservative field.
This is one more weary, dreary repetition of the dismal pattern that has been the damnation of the Republican party, and of the Republic, for almost a hundred years now.
The Republican so-called leadership is mostly composed of respectable Babbits and Country-clublicans, the sort who bring a rubber chicken to a gunfight and whimper afterwards that the other side wasn’t playing by the rules, and history will justify them.
The Democrats,playing to perfection their role as the corsairs and Mongols of democracy, understand that history is written by the winners.
Please excuse me- when the water reaches the top rail, as Mencken advised, it’s time to follow the rats. I must get ahead of the curve and found the next phase of the Progressive movement- for consensual human sacrifice and Cannibal Liberation- while there’s still time.
Well, the Repubs settled for yet another promise from the Dems. They promised to meet in conference to sort it all out. Right. That’ll work out swell. Like the super-committee did.
So is the XL pipeline in the deal or not??
This is a tactic of the Dems which cannot be forestalled, the only thing we can do is throw them out. Boehner can do anything he likes, he can make no legislation unless the Dems agree. It’s a fact of life.
Quit whinging about how awful Boehner is, when the truth is neither you nor he have any choice or better options until and unless the Dems are thrown out in 2012.
The GOP has a weak hold on one sixth of the levers of power in the Government.
That gets you this.
Tom@8 – “Quit whinging about how awful Boehner is”
Cutting the payroll tax was a bad idea in the first place; extending those cuts for two months is worse yet. Cutting them for twelve months is an out and out abomination. This tax reduction can and will be used to de-link the relationship between contributions to social security and benefits paid by social security. Here comes means testing and if you think you need it more than the guy who has never held a job in his life, you’re in for a rude awakening.
Instead of accepting victory for requiring the Administration to declare for or against the Keystone pipeline before the 2012 election, Boehner just had to push for means tested social security. It’s ignorance of colossal dimensions if not pernicious evil.
The delinking happened when Johnson brought in unified budgeting. Every SS payment after you’ve rec’v'd back what you paid in is already a welfare payment,no matter how much you’ve made or how much tax you’ve paid. Get your head on straight.
The trouble with unemployment benefits is not that they are continuing, it’s that they are not being ramped down slowly. An abrupt end to them is not going to help anyone or the economy. Graceful adjustment to economic reality cannot happen when the beast of government is wallowing around crushing one then and then back.
I don’t care about a 2-month extension of the payroll tax holiday. What irks me is the extension of federal unemployment payments.
If Boehner had any stones, he’d call Obama out on his lie about a “tax increase on 160 million Americans”. There’s fewer than 120 million wage earners in the US. And of those 120 million wage earners, fewer than 85 million actually have any net federal tax liability each year.
Boehner needs to take a page out of Newt’s play book.
Rick, I know you’ll blame Ron Paul for the humiliating defeat of Romney losing to Obama in 2012, but take a good hard look in the mirror. You’re part of the reason RINOs like Boehner are running the show.
– is a political cuckold.