Oh, no!!! Obama compromised with the Republicans in order to keep the tax in place for the middle class and get some unemployment benefits. He believed that keeping the middle class cuts in place was more important right now than ending the upper class cuts. Was he right? I'll tell you one thing: One of the bodies that was supposed to answer this question for the president failed to do its job. That body was the Senate.
The Senate, where Democratic dreams go do die, failed once again to do the job of representing the American people. We've known for ten years that the tax cuts were going to expire. Senators have known as well. What should have happened was them working to fix the issue. President Obama even asked them to pass a fix before the election. But the Senate failed. As they have done over and over the past two years.
When a vote finally came, it was symbolic: 53 for, which under current rules is not enough to pass. Yes, the rules themselves take some blame, and hopefully they will be changed over the next congress. But they have been in effect for a while, so everyone knows what the goal posts are. The Senate could have figured out something. But they didn't. So instead, the President, who is not a member of Congress, had to go down and talk to Republicans for the Senate leadership. And he compromises, because, not being a Senator, that's the only leverage he has when he's wanting to sign something.
And then what do we get from Senate Democrats. Well, from the Independent who is actually a Socialist - so the "Democrat" in this case isn't even one - we get this idea that he's going to filibuster it. So is Bernie Sanders angry at the President because Obama is opposing the Senate's bill? He can't be, because Senate didn't do its job and send something to Obama to sign.
The other Senate Democrat we hear from is Mary Landrieu, Democrat-Exxon. Her statement reads:
But why the president thought he had to give in on this? Why he didn’t have the confidence in a Democratic Caucus to hold the line? I don’t know. ... Why the president didn’t think there were .... 40 or 50 or 55 of us — that would stand with him on that principle, I don’t know. But he basically, I guess, didn’t think any of us cared much about it. Well, I want him to know that I do care.
Well, Mary, you couldn't get 54 people to vote for anything, and it takes 60 to get through the Senate.
There are a lot of Senators that have been trying to get stuff done, and I support them. But there are two groups of people that truly deserve our ire: Blue Dogs and Republicans.
The Blue Dogs need to DIAF. They only care about one thing: Who is going to hire them when they get bored with Congress. And Landrieu is one of them, along with Ben Nelson. The thing that has made the last two years unbearable has been how this group as acted like a bunch of prima donnas.
But my real hatred is for the Republicans. What a treasonous group. They should be arrested and tried for crimes against the country. They are there to only do one thing, regain power, and it doesn't matter if a country gets in their way. People can die for all they care.
Lot's of people like to talk about how FDR and LBJ were able to get sweeping legislation through Congress. But if you go and look at the votes you see something: Both times Congress has supermajorities of Democrats - 68+ votes, in FDR's case with only 48 states - and the Republicans also voted like a governing party. Not this time. The Republicans are voting exactly the same way Democrats did when Lincoln became president. Once again, the conservatives are willing to destroy the country to get their way.
So you don't like the Presidents compromise? He's at least trying to make sure that the middle class still has money to spend. The Senate can't even be bothered to do its job.