I have to give Bruce McQuain credit. He writes, today: [1]
[2]
Bruce McQuain
I know this comes as a shock – shock I tell you – but the left is just in a tizzy today about the GOP Senate caucus’s unanimous decision not to allow anything to go forward in the Senate’s lame duck session until the tax cut question is settled.
Andrew Sullivan characterizes it as “dickishness [3]” (and Dan Riehl comments that Sullivan has finally found something to like about the GOP). John Cole is on about “first priorities being millionaires [4]“, Charles Johnson hits it with “GOP totally committed to obstructionism [5]“, and the not so Moderate Voice snarks “Common ground, Republican style [6]“.
Whatever happened to the celebration of the minority power of Senate Democrats when they were not in the majority? As I recall then, Minority Leader Reid was aghast that the majority should want the ability to ramrod it’s agenda through the Senate without any input or ability to check it by the minority. And at the time he used the filibuster (and that’s what this is by the GOP, a filibuster) he certainly considered it a check against “absolute power” and something that our much “wiser” founding fathers encouraged. Then it ensured “that no one person and no single party could have total control” according to Reid.
I say, give him credit, because he’s nailed a large portion of this to the wall.
But I think there’s a few more political angles to all of this.
First, let’s get basic:
; nobody’s taxes are getting cut by current actions in the senate . What’s going on, is that Senate Republicans are preventing with this action, the largest single tax increase in history.
What we have here, is acquiescence to the common mislabeling of these actions as a tax cut. Simply put, it is not. What it is, is an action which extends tax cuts which were both revenue boosting and the economy boosting during the Bush administration. This action presents record tax increases which would most certainly cripple our already fragile economy.
What we have here is how democrats tend to win arguments. How many times if we heard “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy “? That’s what all this was called, when Bush originally proposed them. They were, in fact, tax cuts for everybody, right across the board. Trouble is, the phrase “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy” became so ingrained in our daily conversation because we got hammered with the inaccurate description day after day after day from the supposed mainstream media and the Democrats. (But I repeat myself)
The left, who most certainly doesn’t like tax cutting of any kind, and invariably casts such things as negatives, saw they had an opportunity to divide Americans, by exhibiting their typical trait of engaging in class warfare. So, while the left was engaging in telling us all how the bush era tax cutting was all for the benefit of the wealthy, they would’ve liked us to not be fully aware of the fact that these tax cuts were for everyone.
So, now we come to today. We see the democrat controlled Congress, who put all of these actions until after the election last month, putting forward a proposal to extend those Bush-era tax cuts [7] but only for families making under $250,000 a year.
And so, even after the Republicans have taken the house, and even with half of Americans agreeing that the Democrats socialist attempts to soak the rich are not in America’s best interests…. [8] the Democrats continue their class war… successfully, too. .
Does anyone wonder why talk of compromise with the Democrats makes most Americans cringe?