Associated Press
The White House made the first formal move last week in the ongoing fiscal talks, presenting congressional Republicans with a substantive, detailed plan. GOP leaders, not surprisingly, hated it -- President Obama's proposal met the goals Republicans laid out, but did so in a way they found offensive.
What striking, though, is the extent to which the congressional GOP leadership seems absolutely stunned by the White House's opening bid.
[House Speaker John Boehner] said the reason negotiations are going so poorly is that Obama administration officials -- in particular, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- aren't taking Republicans seriously. Boehner said he was shocked at Geithner's proposal to Republicans last week.
"I was flabbergasted. I looked at him and I said, 'You can't be serious.' I've just never seen anything like it," Boehner said.
If Boehner has "never seen anything like" Obama's debt-reduction plan, the House Speaker probably needs to do more to keep up with current events. There's nothing in Obama's plan that (a) wasn't already included in the president's previous budgets; (b) wasn't part of his 2012 re-election platform; or (c) both. The president's opening gambit was bold, but there wasn't anything that new in the proposal.
So why in the world are Republicans looking for the fainting couch? Why did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reportedly "burst into laughter" after hearing the White House offer? Because GOP congressional leaders thought they'd established certain unwritten rules for how this game is supposed to be played -- and Obama is choosing to ignore them, leaving Republicans flummoxed and stunned.
The New York Times reports today that the president is "scarred by failed negotiations in his first term and emboldened by a clear if close election to a second, has emerged as a different kind of negotiator." Throughout his first term, Obama "repeatedly offered what he considered compromises on stimulus spending, health care and deficit reduction to Republicans, who either rejected them as inadequate or pocketed them and insisted on more."
So, this time, the president presented a plan that met his own standards, and challenged GOP leaders to do the same. Apparently, Republicans didn't see this coming, leaving them, in Boehner's word, flabbergasted.
But as E.J. Dionne Jr. explained, an "entirely new political narrative is taking shape before our eyes."
[W]hy was anyone surprised that Obama's initial offer to the Republicans was a compendium of what he'd actually prefer? We became so accustomed to Obama's earlier habit of making preemptive concessions that the very idea he'd negotiate in a perfectly normal way amazed much of Washington. Rule No. 1 is that you shouldn't start bargaining by giving stuff away when the other side has not even made concrete demands. [...]
[A] normal negotiation looks strange only because the past two years have been so utterly abnormal, driven by tea party extremism and an irrational hostility to Obama, a fundamentally moderate man who has already shown a willingness to offer more than his share of concessions.
Under the rules Boehner and McConnell drew up last year, Republicans are supposed to tell the president, "Make us happy," and Obama is supposed to keep offering conservative ideas in the hopes of guessing what they'll find satisfactory.
The sooner GOP leaders realize the rules have changed, the easier it will be to find a resolution to the current impasse.
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The goal is to do whatever is proper and necessary. It is improper to be the world police and conduct the drug war. Legalize pot, use hemp bio fuel, get rid of idiots like Boehner.
This is a really big story for at least two additional reasons that make it really important for Obama to stick to his guns. First, he stands with public opinion and public opinion stands with him. The goopers stand for money. If he gives up, money beats democracy. We can't have that.
Second, if I'm getting this right, Boehner operates by a new rule he invented-- he'll only introduce things that will get at least 218 gop votes in the House. Just like McConnell in the senate, he's trying to run the place as if we had a parliamentary system. This is not American. It's British, it's Canadian. Both those places and many others are run by a parliamentary despotism. We exited the British system before it developed that way and built up our own system. What an American speaker of the house needs is 218 of the duly elected members sitting in the House of Representatives of the United States. He doesn't need 218 members of his own party.
If Boehner is allowed to run the House this way, we too will become (even more of) a single-party despotic state, ruled by a party caucus. The current predicament has the chance to break up this despotic pattern before it has a chance to get set.
It's important to break it. So stick with it, team Obama!
They're not gonna go down without a fight.
He didn't invent that rule, the Republicans in the 90s and first GW Bush term invented it. Didn't work for them in the end then either.
Thanks, TC. So it was yet another Gingrich thing? That guy has so much to answer for ...
The President is finally taking his case to the American people and telling the intransigent Congress the Administration will not fold. By sending Geithner to deliver this message was a stroke of genius since he is viewed by Wall Street as "one of them". The message is clear - Republicans will again trash the middle class to protect the top 1%. If they have no idea what this will do to their future prospects as a political party, then they deserve the fate of irrelevance.
Boehner wants the middle class to give up the mortgage deduction and some of our Medicare benefits. So he better throw out some cover "What, this isn't even written in the English language! I've never in all my life...."
Compromise, Mr. Boehner. Look it up. At this point I'm in favor of the sequestration. Everyone's taxes will go up, the economy will go back into recession, and we can blame the Republicans. If that's what they truly want....
If I had more time, I would be on the phone to Boehner's office every day: The "one term president" remark from McConnell was enough to send a lot of votes towards the president. Insist on obstruction? Forget the next 2 elections. Don't even bother.
Where is the real estate lobby... forget about a housing recovery if people won't get mortgage tax relief.
@Lebowsky
Yeah I've been trying to figure that out too. Real estate, banks, and construction all should be SCREAMING at the top of their longs over the idea of the loss of the mortgage tax deduction. You lose that and you lose the main incentive that makes owning a home better than renting.
Not so fast, fellas. The one thing about the mortgage interest deduction is that it disproportionately favors high-earners.
For instance, assuming a 70% or 75% loan-to-value mortgage in both, someone owning a $2 million house has a whole lot more mortgage interest to deduct (and therefore protect from tax) than someone owning a $200,000 house. Perhaps there's a way to replace this with something more equitable. And if so, I'd gladly give up my mortgage interest deduction.
Personally, I think the fact that realtors, banks and the construction industry aren't screaming is that they don't think there's much chance it'll happen.
Both very good points JL
So, I assume the whole Imperial Presidency concerns were only when Bush was in power. Forget taxes, entitlements, etc... If the president (any president) can raise the debt limit without congress, why would we ever need a budget. Everything could be done under Executive Order. I am shocked that anyone (Liberal or Conservative) would think that is a good idea. Libs hated Bush, no trust there. Conservatives hate Obama, no trust there. We need the checks and balances.
The difference being that the Liberals weren't stupid enough to trash the economy. And the "conservatives" aren't actual conservatives - they're far right radical revolutionaries, for which there is a one-word synonym for all those words. They may have hijacked the word over the past 50 years, but that still doesn't make them actual "conservatives."
And furthermore, the only reason we'd need to transfer the debt-ceiling authority out of Congress is that the folks there now have demonstrated they can't handle the responsibility. The very idea that they loudly and proudly proclaim they'd let the country default on its debt, rather than work toward compromise on a budget, makes me and a whole lot of other people really nervous. You know, after the third speeding ticket, you take the car keys away from your teenager.
You're completely misrepresenting the proposal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/take-debt-ceiling-authority-away-from-congress/2012/12/03/20513fe2-3d41-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_blog.html
You're presenting this like the President of the United States would have unilateral authority to make decisions about raising the debt ceiling and that isn't true.
Additionally you do realize that Executive Orders cannot create laws or policies, but rather they declare the White House's interpretation of already existent laws/policies as passed by Congress. That, again, is a gross misrepresentation of the authority of an Executive Order.
Ignoring the stupidity of PolitiFact's "mostly true" meter for a statement they agree they found to be true (but that they somehow decide that their subjective interpretation of the underlying implication by a person not expressly stated somehow transfers into "truth" versus "lie") most other nations do not have a debt ceiling. You make this to sound like it's somehow this authoritarian grab all for power and somehow unprecedented. It's not. This article by PolitiFact gives you some good detail on how other nations manager their debt without a debt ceiling.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jul/25/arianna-huffington/arianna-huffington-says-us-debt-ceiling-rules-are-/
Wow, really sad to think that the Speaker of the House, who would be President if the worst case scenario ever occurred would say nothing's being done, he's flabbergasted that they have to do something. You know, like a counter proposal to the plan?
These folks need to understand that they cannot act like an entertainment "media" host and have the approval of the American people. Get out of your bubble, the President said we need to get out of our comfort zones.
Yes, the left is not comfortable with negotiating "saving" Medicare with budget proposals. There's an AARP ad out that warns not to debate this in a last minute budget stand off. That should make many uncomfortable.
Here's a couple of items:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3yHa8brzNA
http://www.aarp.org/about-aarp/press-center/info-11-2012/AARP-Opposes-Cost-Shifting-to-Seniors-in-Medicare-and-Medicaid.html
Sorry, that is not just "the left", either…
AARP sells insurance and does inform the "over 50" crowd, which we have to think that those who are young will some day be "over 50" (we hope).
Never in my life have I ever seen such disrespect shown to a sitting President. Where was the outrage when Bush dragged out country down, and stepped all over the citizens? These crazy Republicans just won't stop their BS and get on with doing the job they were hired to do. This article and the disgusting rants about Obama turned my stomach....
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/12/boehner-obama-needs-to-stop-acting-like-he-won-election.html
Umm, Loren? Sometimes it's hard to tell given what these guys *do* say, but Borowitz does satire. Some of the quotes he used in that post are real, some are made up. Those guys haven't quite said everything in the piece, at least not in public and not in those exact words.