(Joshua Roberts/REUTERS)
If you were watching the floor debate and votes in the House Friday, as the 2012 competing budget plans were being considered, you saw what looked like chaos at the end of the vote on the extreme of the extreme Republican Study Committee proposal—a budget so radical it makes abolishing Medicare look moderate. As Brian Beutler tells the
story, that extremism gave Democratic leadership an idea.
"I thought to myself the Republican leadership is probably thinking we're going to defeat it for them," Hoyer told me in a phone interview Friday. "I said to myself I'm not interested in seeing that happen. I want the Republicans to show what they believe. And if a majority of them believe that that's the kind of budget [they want] the American people need to know that."
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"I also knew that if we telegraphed that early, they would obviously try to anticipate it, work their caucus early," he said. "As a result I did not have a whip meeting on this -- I did discuss it with the Leader [Nancy Pelosi], I discussed it with the Democratic leadership. I told them it was my plan. And they were all for that."
If he'd briefed his caucus on the tactic days ahead of the vote, word might have leaked. So he gave them just about five minutes notice.
All but 15 Dems voted present, forcing several GOP members to switch their votes in order to defeat this really embarrassing bill. Of course, there were 15 recalcitrant Dems, including a number of Blue Dogs, who wouldn't change their no votes to present votes, either because they think it would hurt their reelection or they wouldn't break their record of never having voted present. But it does create a trap for the Republicans in the future, when they want to put up their crazy base mollifying bills, Hoyer says. "If they continue to do that their members are either going to have to decide early that they're going to have to vote against those policies, or they're going to be back in that position."
What really counts, though, is the unity among the Dems on the final Ryan Medicare-killing budget vote. Credit for that, argue Chris Cillizza and Greg Sargent, goes to Nancy Pelosi. Cillizza:
Nancy Pelosi succeeded in keeping Democrats unanimously opposed to the budget, ensuring that when election season rolls around Republicans will own their budget vote fully.
It’s a tried and true strategy and one that was successfully employed by Senate Republicans on President Obama’s economic stimulus bill — only three Republicans voted for the plan — and the health care law that garnered zero GOP votes.
Sargent argues that Pelosi was key to convincing Obama to take a hard line against the Medicare cuts in his speech Wednesday, and that she's been the force arguing that Medicare is going to be the key issue for 2012. Hearkening back to 2005, when Pelosi was instrumental in keeping Dems unified against Bush's Social Security privatization scheme, she sees equal advantage for drawing contrast between the two parties in the upcoming election on Medicare. Quoting Cillizza, "Reverse the party names and substitute 'budget' for 'health care' and you get some sense of what some GOP incumbents might be headed for next fall."