Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi challenges Speaker Boehner. (Larry Downing/Reuters)
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has responded to Speaker John Boehner's recent debt ceiling brinksmanship with a challenge of her own: Have a vote on extending the middle class tax cuts now, she suggests, since he's so worked up about extending the Bush tax cuts immediately.
Dear Speaker Boehner:
Without further delay, the Majority Leadership should schedule a vote on extension of the middle-income tax cuts, as early as next week, to increase certainty for millions of American taxpayers and for the economy. We should not delay passing this legislation that will help afford all Americans the opportunity to reach their goals and realize the promise of the American Dream.
We must ask the very wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit. [...]
Okay, so a better threshold for wealthy taxpayers is
President Obama's $250,000 annual income, and those revenues should go to investing in getting the economy running rather than deficit reduction.
But what Pelosi has done here is turn the speaker's supposed urgent concern about uncertainty over the Bush tax cut extension and his deficit obsession against him. Of course, we know he doesn't really care about the deficit. The fraudulent Republican budgets show that. And when it comes to taxpayers, Boehner's concern isn't at all about extending the cuts to middle income America. He doesn't give a shit for their uncertainty or he wouldn't repeatedly take the policies that most help them—like unemployment extensions and the payroll tax cuts—hostage.
All of which will be pointed out neatly when Boehner refuses to rise to Pelosi's challenge.