Steve Benen hears Boehner say this:
If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions, I’ll vote for them.
and, like seemingly everyone with a mountaintop large or small, inexplicably takes this away:
Boehner, in other words, appears to be on board with the Obama proposal
Can we just not think in this country anymore?
- Is Boehner in the Senate?
There is no second thing. If the answer to Question 1 is “No,” then his opinion matters fuck-all. He said this to put a patina of reasonableness on the GOP’s entirely unreasonable and indefensible position that billionaires desperately need an extra $100k come tax-time. They know this meaningless statement will get wide play, much wider (read: vastly wider) than their ultimate actions to bottle this thing up in the Senate (and even that’s assuming the feckless Democrat bothers to bring it to the floor, itself a gigantic and likely foolhardy assumption).
If and when that all happens, the GOP will simply point to (meaningless) statements like this one as examples of their genteel nature and broad willingness to “work across the aisle.” The MSM will report the whole thing as “a Democrat failure to achieve 60 votes needed in the Senate” and Broder will pronounce himself suitably delighted that the GOP tried so very hard. Truly, they are the serious adults up to DC.
Is this so very hard to understand? Apparently it is.
Lemkin 