Legal Commentary

How Dems Can Win The Fight For Middle Class Tax Cuts

By Big Tent Democrat

Josh Marshall:

Legislation and politics aren't two separate worlds. Each feeds off each other, as the Democrats learned to their profound discomfiture during the Health Care Reform debate last year. Especially on the cusp of an election, any inability to grasp this can and usually is fatal. Reasoning that the views of the GOP leadership in the House are secondary because the bill has to get through the Senate only makes sense if your field of vision doesn't extend more than half a mile out of your Senate office.

[. . .] Boehner's comments give the president the opportunity to do all three. And with the legislative leadership on the Hill seemingly hapless, it looks like it will come down to the President and how he plays his cards over the next 48 hours. The logical move for the White House is to jump on Boehner's opening and push for an extension of the Bush tax cuts for incomes under $250,000 and push for a vote before the election. [. . .] If Boehner and some Republicans vote for the sub-250k bill in the House, great. It allows the president to play them off Republicans in the Senate. If no Republicans vote for it in the House, great. It gives the Democrats a clearer position to run on. [. . ] In all of this, the same leverage that is pushing for good policy is working for good politics. And the two reinforce each other.

Handled well, this train of events will inevitably force a division between Republicans who are ideologically committed to the upper income tax cuts and those who just want to avoid being on the wrong side of an issue and get on with getting to November 2nd so they can win a ton of seats in Congress. But that division itself will throw the Republicans off balance, perhaps to a significant degree. And what if the President says to make the upper income cuts the referendum point of the election and Republicans still have a great election night? Again, really not something the President and the Democrats have much reason to worry over since the crux of the issue is that once the cuts for everyone under $250,000 are locked in, the politics of going to the mat with the president solely over tax cuts for extremely wealthy people will be toxic.

What Josh Marshall said.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 13, 2010 (boomark / email).