Put the hostage on the ballot
by digby
Brian Beutler fills us in on the latest:
It’s gut check time for Congressional Democrats on the payroll tax cut bill.
Regarding that legislation, Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell emails me with the following statement: “The Leader will not support any bill without the Keystone XL language as part of the agreement.”
House Speaker John Boehner is also insisting that he’ll amend any Senate-passed payroll tax cut bill to add the Keystone provision to it, if it’s not already in there. So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama now have a choice: stick to their guns and object to the provision — at the risk of allowing the payroll tax cut (and unemployment insurance and the Medicare “doc fix”) to expire? Or give in to the GOP.
Beutler explains that while it would be a political embarrassment if they cave, the policy is actually a bit more benign — it will have to be decided in 2 months and the State Department has said that it will kill the proposal if the bill forces the decision now. The kicker of course, is that the Republicans want to use it to pressure Obama to overrule the State Department throughout the election.
This was widely considered to be a victory for the kind of people who believe in climate change and would rather their kids and grandkids not live in a dystopian hellhole. You know, dirty hippies. It’s well worth it to the Republicans to destroy the environment if they can get a good punch in. There couldn’t be a better Christmas present for the Tea Party.
But since the decision was only a postponement in the first place and the point of this is to make Obama the object of taunts through the election if he fails to overrule his State department, I say bring it on. Let the State Department kill the proposal, have the president call it “common sense” as he did with Plan B — and take it to the people. If the Republicans are going to taunt him, he will be highly motivated to make a good case. The country has a right to hear this debate.
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