What happens to the Republican mind
when an inflexible mandate.....
In the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, candidates and incumbents solemnly bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases. While ATR has the role of promoting and monitoring the Pledge, the Taxpayer Protection Pledge is actually made to a candidate's constituents, who are entitled to know where candidates stand before sending them to the capitol. Since the Pledge is a prerequisite for many voters, it is considered binding as long as an individual holds the office for which he or she signed the Pledge.
meets an undeniable concession.....
Grover Norquist said Monday that he would vote in favor of the Senate’s plan to raise taxes on those earning $450,000 or more annually and said it does not violate his anti-tax pledge.
“Is this a violation of the pledge?” CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asked him on air.
“No, it is not,” Norquist said on CNN.
“So if Republican Senator ‘X’ votes in favor of the agreement tonight, he or she is not violating the pledge?” Blitzer pressed.
“No. The Republicans have voted in the past to make the tax cuts permanent, all the Republicans, all the pledge takers—” Norquist said.
“So you’re giving your blessing to the Republicans, to Harry Reid, not only the Democrats, to Mitch McConnell and all the Republicans, go ahead and support the deal?” Blitzer said.
“Not having read it all, I’m not endorsing it. But right now, as explained, it doesn’t violate the pledge,” Norquist said. “We need to go back and at the end of the day make sure that the tax cuts are made permanent for everybody, but that’s a fight for the weeks and months to come. This is progress, making 84 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent.”
Republican orthodoxy has been shredded by a logical flaw. The rigid inflexibility that was the strength of the Norquist Tax Pledge has been been flipped into a fatal weakness.
There is a virus of irreconcilable incongruity raging in the minds of the robotic Cult of Norquist true believers.
Smoke is now billowing from the microprocessors of the Tea Party faithful.
Erck Erickson on Redstate has this lead House Republicans: Don’t Play the Game
Love that smell of right wing ozone on New Year's Day.
Well, today the White House is telling Fox New’s Ed Henry that this was the game all along. According to Ed Henry, the White House staff is saying that getting the GOP to break their tax pledge is, “One of the most consequential policy achievements of the last couple of decades.” The plan cuts $1.00 in spending for every $41.00 in tax increases. Contrary to what Senator Pat Toomey is claiming today, everyone’s taxes will also go up – the 99% and the 1%.
That will be the headline if the House Republicans vote for this plan.
Now, many of you think this is the best deal we can get. I understand that. But consider this — the White House has designed this solely for purposes of getting the GOP to break their tax pledge. Any way we play the game we lose.
The only way to even think of winning is to not play this game.
Which was followed by this comment on Redstate
The Speaker and the Minority Leader must go, and they must be replaced with GOP Senators and Members of Congress who are seeing this deal for what it is-- a ridiculous farce. The fiscal cliff is much, much preferable to this GOP capitulation being peddled as a deal. The fiscal cliff brings on odious taxes, but at least it gives us spending cuts, too. This deal brings on odious taxes and does absolutely nothing to cut spending or to stop the ever-expanding size of government. Every single "deal" our Party Leadership has made with the President on spending and debt has resulted in more spending and more debt, and now the Leadership seems to be delighting in breaking the back of fiscal conservatives who had pledged not to do deals of this very sort. At the risk of sounding rude, if anyone believes that this deal if "spending now to pave the way for spending cuts later," you're being wholly delusional. Our Party Leadership has proved itself incapable of delivering real cuts and real restraints Big Government.
Perhaps now the far right is turning its wrath on elected Republicans.