House Speaker John Boehner (Larry Downing/Reuters)
House Speaker John Boehner remains in a bit of a pickle over the end of year work Congress has to do, including the payroll tax cut extension, the perennial Medicare payments to doctors fix, extending unemployment insurance, and keeping his caucus happy. As
we've been detailing here, GOP leadership understands the political need to extend the payroll tax cuts or be flayed for the next year as the party that raised taxes on working families. To get the rank-and-file on board, Boehner has had to add
crazy-ass "sweeteners" that his mouth-breathers will flock to, knowing that these crazy-ass sweeteners which, so far, the Senate and the White House say they'll reject.
The political message to his colleagues is, bluntly, don’t screw this up. In a meeting Thursday morning with House Republicans in the same Longworth Office Building room where he was elected speaker, Boehner reminded Republicans they’ve already cut spending, changed the culture of the Capitol and stopped Obama’s agenda in its tracks.
“The big prize is 2012,” Boehner said, according to several sources in the room. [...]
The speaker has tossed in a series of sweeteners to get the GOP to support the payroll tax: restarting the Keystone XL pipeline, cutting jobless benefits in half, targeting environmental rules, slicing money out of Obama’s health care law and limiting the Medicare benefits the wealthy can get. In exchange, they’ll give Obama the political victory and get out of town for the rest of 2011.
But it’s a gamble. Boehner’s hope is that the Senate and Obama accept the right-leaning bill. And when they don’t — Democrats are sure to remove most of those prized items — the speaker will have to rely on enough Republicans backing a final compromise. [...]
[T]he downside for Republicans is likely to come if Senate Democrats don’t budge. Boehner’s strategy relies on the upper chamber — and Obama — accepting some combination of restarting the Keystone XL pipeline, slashes to the health care law and a federal pay freeze.
Senate Democrats can't budge. According to this article, there's already movement toward the GOP, with Democrats potentially giving in on the one issue that provides them the most political weight: "scrapping the surtax on millionaires, which Republicans hate, and replacing it with a series of cost-cutting offsets that can win GOP backing." Winning the backing of the nihilists, that's never a good place for Democrats to think they have to be in.
This is what Democrats have to keep in mind: "If, and when, the GOP is forced to accept a paltry deal that doesn’t include any of the conservatives’ prized items, it could weaken GOP leadership’s position and bring Congress to a standstill just days before Christmas."