CQ Roll Call June 18, 2013 | Register

Republicans Lost and Boehner Knows It

Posted at 8 a.m. on Dec. 4, 2012

While House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) released an opening bid on the “fiscal cliff” that shows significant distance between House Republicans and President Obama, Ezra Klein notes that the offer represents Boehner’s recognition that “Republicans are in a far weaker position than they were in 2011.”

“In 2011, not long after an election in which Democrats were utterly routed, Erskine Bowles testified before the debt supercommittee… It was mostly an exercise in taking the Republican position and the Democratic position and dividing by two… That’s the plan Boehner offered the White House on Monday… it’s a far more centrist proposal than anything Boehner has offered in public before now.”

“It is not surprising that Boehner wishes he could go back in time and accept the president’s offer from 2011, or fight for the compromise Bowles outlined before the supercommittee. Those are, from his vantage point today, quite good deals. But elections have consequences, and the consequence of this election is that those offers are no longer on the table.”

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Budget & Taxes

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  • DownriverDem

    Raising the Medicare age is a non starter. When are repubs going to act like there is real flesh and blood behind their hurtful ideas? Oh yea. Repubs don’t give a damn at all about we the people.

    • Lorehead

      Eh, we’re just rolling out Obamacare next year. If Obamacare isn’t adequate for 65- and 66-year-olds, then it isn’t adequate for 63- or 64-year-olds, either. If the argument against doing this is that it wouldn’t really save money because we’d be paying for their health care anyway, then this isn’t really much of a concession and we should be willing to make it in a horse trade.

  • embo66

    It’s pretty clear that the GOP are far more interested in protecting the wealthy than they are the rest of us. Why else fight back so hard against raising rates to their Clinton-era level on a mere 2% of the population? (Though I do note with gratitude that they have lately suspended all those eternal false claims that this increase would “hurt small businesses.”)

    But what I find most troublesome is their continued insistence on throwing Social Security and Medicare into this deficit tussle. Social Security (and to some extent Medicare, too) are less “entitlements” than they are programs each American has been paying into all their working lives. For some Americans, that’s easily 30-40 years of contributions. And SS — in addition to being literally outside the federal budget — is actually a very healthy program that, with just a tweak or two, could be made fiscally sound for another few generations.

    It remains a mystery why Republicans are fighting so intently to curtail benefits for 98% of Americans so that the lopsided benefits the very rich enjoy can remain intact.

    • billbear1961

      It is no mystery, whatsoever.

      The GOP is the party of, by and for the corporate-fascist elite. They flirt with mindless and vicious social reactionaries because they need their votes.

      In its current form, it is corrupt BEYOND REDEMPTION.

      Their goal is a ruthless state-backed corporatism—corporate FASCISM—that will replicate and surpass the Chinese “achievement.”

      If they succeed, only a wealthy elite will have any rights AT ALL.

      It is their very raison d’être.

      They are the enemies of God and man; the destroyers of liberty, equality, and any SENSE of JUSTICE; the eager and depraved WHORES OF MAMMON.

      And we forget that at our DEADLY PERIL.

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