For all of you who flamed me last week for being a bad Democrat or being played by the media or whatever because obviously Harry Reid would never do something so stupid, eat a bag of dicks:
The White House worked closely with liberal House Democrats last week to torpedo a tax deal that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was negotiating with Republicans.
The unusual move to kill a Reid-backed proposal has raised suspicions among Senate negotiators about the White House’s motivations. They believe President Obama’s team is eyeing a broad corporate tax reform deal in 2015, when Republicans will control the Senate and the House.
“It might indicate less about the merits of the package and more about the White House using progressives to kill a deal now in order to pave the way for a deal with Republicans next Congress that progressives will absolutely loathe,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide.
The administration joined forces with the House Democrats with one thing in mind: making sure a possible veto wouldn’t be overturned.
“Clearly the White House calculated that the House Democrats could sustain a veto,” said another Democratic aide. “The White House had conversations with a slew of House Democrats on Tuesday. It was furiously trying to assess how much opposition there was in the House. They were very upset.”
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.
The Reid-GOP deal would have indefinitely revived both the popular credit for business research and a tax break for small-business expensing, a pair of proposals that House Republicans have been pushing for months.
Democrats would have gotten a long-term extension of a tax break that helps families pay for college costs, while Reid — who is up for reelection in 2016 — would have scored a permanent extension of a tax break for state and local sales taxes that’s especially important to Nevada.
But Democrats wouldn’t have gotten long-term extensions of expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which some in the party had called their top priority in the tax discussions.
Republicans balked at that idea in the wake of Obama’s decision to shield millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.
We need a new minority leader ASAP.