Liberal Democrats are angry, outraged, yelling and screaming and one, unnamed as of yet, even yelled "Fuck the President" during Thursday’s House Democratic Caucus meeting.Just another day of anger and temper tantrums in the liberal progressive world.
By now most political junkies know that the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted on a non-binding resolution against the tax deal that Obama and Republicans agreed to in order to show their displeasure over the fact that after trying to deal with them, Obama simply took matters into his own hands and negotiated directly with Republicans, bypassing Pelosi and House Democrats completely.
On the Senate side, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell have been working and managed to get a bill written that they have now unveiled, keeping the President and Republican's framework but adding a few "sweeteners" as media are calling them to draw more Democratic support.
Initial test votes on related items have indicate that there will be enough votes in the Senate to pass the tax deal before they go home for Christmas.
Senate leaders on Thursday evening formally unveiled the huge tax cut package worked out between the White House and Republicans and immediately began debating it, while House Democrats rebelled against President Obama and threatened to keep the measure from ever reaching the floor.
A procedural vote was scheduled in the Senate for Monday evening to overcome a filibuster by Democrats opposed to the plan. But in a first test on Thursday, the Senate voted 65 to 11 on a technical issue related to the bill, suggesting it would not be difficult to secure the 60 votes needed to defeat the filibuster.
The $858 billion deal that was unveiled can be found here.
Not only are House Democrats peeved with Obama, The Hill reports that they are using their last few weeks at being in charge of the House's appropriations committee to as payback.
Incensed over President Obama’s tax compromise, House Democratic leaders are showing signs of abandoning the administration and going their own way on critical issues such as national security.
In a striking move, the appropriations committee late Wednesday attached a provision to a $1.1 trillion resolution to keep the government funded next year that would prevent Obama from spending any funds to try terrorism suspects in civilian court instead of military commissions.
The language would essentially prevent the closing of the detainee prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Some House Democrats viewed the move as an act of defiance and a direct demonstration of just how furious the caucus is with Obama’s decision to work with Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts.
But many other Democrats, including Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), a member of the defense appropriations subcommittee, said they didn’t even know the provision was included.
Moran’s anger with the president boiled over in a short interview Thursday with The Hill about the provision and the tax debate held shortly after the Democratic caucus voted to reject Obama’s tax-cut deal.
“This is a lack of leadership on the part of Obama,” fumed Moran (D-Va.) “I don’t know where the f*** Obama is on this or anything else. They’re AWOL.
Emphasis mine.. so it was either payback or they still aren't reading what they are voting on.
What stunning incompetence or petulance.
Either way, thank heavens they won't be in charge of the House or the purse strings after January.
In other news the LA Times reports that liberal donors are annoyed with with Obama and some are not planning to part with their money in the 2012 elections, because of the tax deal.
In the meantime, Charles Krauthammer believes Obama won the tax fight and the perpetually angry Democrats are just too stupid to understand that he won them a StimulusII.
No, cries the left: Obama violated a sacred principle. A 39.6 percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? "This is the public option debate all over again," said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities, thus setting us inexorably on the road to the left's Promised Land: a Canadian-style single-payer system. The left is similarly clueless on the tax-cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus - what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I but was heretofore politically unattainable.
Obama's public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and politically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the independents who elected him in 2008 - and abandoned the Democrats in 2010 - is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception that he is a man of the left.
Hence that news-conference attack on what the administration calls the "professional left" for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama's Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity - their ideological stupidity and inability to see the "long game" really do get under Obama's skin - but a decidedly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican?
The bottom line here is the Senate will pass the tax deal and the House will either pass it now in one of the Democrats' last acts while they have control of the House or Republicans when they take control in January will pass it.
It will be passed despite the screaming, angry, whining of far left liberal progressives.
On a side note here but worth mentioning: For two years we have heard the left crying out that Republicans have been obstructionists and have refused to work with Democrats on anything, and on the tax deal Obama and Republicans worked together to hammer out a deal and the far left is still crying because Obama dared work with the right.
They never wanted any bipartisanship, they wanted to steamroll anything they desired through and with control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, they did exactly that for the past two years.
Now that the GOP has won control of the House, Obama has to work with Republicans and liberals are simply throwing a temper tantrum because they have lost their hold on a one party rule.
[Update] A little extra in my next post.. Barack Obama has now made it clear he considers House Democrats irrelevant.
.