Visual source: Newseum
Reuters:
Republican reins slipping from Boehner
WaPo:
House Republicans faced mounting pressure Wednesday from critics inside and outside Congress who worry that their standoff with President Obama over whether to extend a payroll tax cut could do lasting damage to the GOP.
The Hill:
Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said he agreed with the Wall Street Journal’s blistering assessment on the failure of House Republican leadership in the payroll-tax debate, and conceded that Republicans have “lost the optics” and should fold on the issue.
“I think the Wall Street Journal editorial hit it right on the nail, the question now is how do Republicans get out of it,” Rove told Fox News on Wednesday.
Back before the 2010 election, I made the case that the Republicans were into wielding power with no interest in actual governance. Alas, that's been proven true time and time again. But this time, they've really stepped in it. Rove's comments, of course, are part of a coordinated message: your elders are unhappy with you. For another example:
Greg Sargent:
These leaks are starting to seem deliberate: Senate GOP aides are sending a message to the House side that if they don’t pass the Senate short-term extension, they won’t be able to count on any help in getting themselves out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. Have any GOP Senators come out and said anything supportive of what the House side is up to? Senator Mitch McConnell has been awfully quiet lately.
This, by the way, is another reason it’s getting less and less likely that Dems will drop their refusal to negotiate further until the House GOP passes the Senate proposal. Dems believe that the pressure on House Republicans from their own side is only going to mount, and that their political situation will continue deteriorating at an exponentially rapid pace.
Ana Marie Cox:
A friend covering the Hill impasse over the payroll tax cuts insists that Speaker John Boehner's job has become a task of "herding squirrels." Not cats, the more typical go-to cliché for trying to organize the unorganizable, but squirrels: "Squirrels are panicky and prone to irrational running into traffic."
This is an apt enough metaphor, as no matter what the eventual policy outcome – an extension of the tax cut or no – Congressional Republicans are roadkill. The question is just whether or not Democrats will chase out into the street after them.
Kirsten Powers:
It seems the GOP “class warfare” argument has been a dud. True, most Americans don’t begrudge rich people their largesse, nor should they, if it is lawfully earned. What is unseemly is the GOP’s insistence in treating the well off as though they matter more than the middle class. Most Americans just want a fair shake, and there is nothing fair about insisting that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are necessary and don’t need to be paid for, and then turn around and try to block a middle-class tax cut and complain that it’s not paid for.
Furthermore, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the Bush tax cuts have been in effect for 10 years and the middle class is still waiting to be “trickled down” upon by the wealthy.
Even millionaire Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich seem to sense something is amiss in the American economic structure, as evidenced by their recent Kinsley gaffes, which acknowledged that the super rich aren’t always the magnificent benefactors or “job creators” the GOP tries to pawn them off as. Yeah, I’m talking about you, Mitt Romney.
Too bad for them that embracing reality counts as being “off message” in the Republican Party.
Dana Milbank:
Atop the House chamber Wednesday morning, the flag fluttered in the breeze. In his office underneath the Capitol dome, House Speaker John Boehner twisted in the wind.
His House Republicans had killed a bipartisan plan to cut taxes for 160 million Americans, earning themselves an avalanche of criticism and condemnation from friend and foe alike. So Boehner assembled nine of his House Republican colleagues in his conference room, invited in the TV cameras, and proclaimed that Republicans really and truly want to enact the payroll-tax break that they just defeated.
“We’re here. We’re ready to go to work,” Boehner announced.
But the only thing he was working on, it turned out, was damage control.
EJ Dionne:
The one thing Obama cannot do is yield and make new substantive concessions now. This would undermine the very image of strength he has been building since September, after the debt-ceiling fiasco, which weakened the Republicans but also weakened him. He’s come back in the polls by standing up to the GOP right. If even the Wall Street Journal editorial page concedes that the Democrats occupy the political high ground, maybe even the most skittish in the GOP’s ranks will start believing it.
