December 20, 2011
I’m listening to CNN as the deplorable House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-VA), talks about the House vote, just made, to force a conference on HR 3630, the payroll tax and unemployment extension proposal. Legislative proposals must pass both the House and the Senate in identical forms to meet constitutional requirements. A conference committee is an often-used method to reach a compromise between competing House and Senate proposals. Regarding HR 3630, Cantor and his Tea Party Congressloons did not accept the Senate version of HR 3630 that sought a two month semi-solution/compromise to the difficulties posed by widely divergent House and Senate HR 3630s. How divergent? The Senate version of HR 3630 was 34 pages. The House? 370 pages. Now that’s divergent. And yes, senators kicked the can down the road. But yes, a kick is better than a stomp that was, with few exceptions, the House version of HR 3630.
Of course, since the House leadership (apparently now putatively led by Cantor, not Boehner, the de facto Speaker) and Tea Partiers desire nothing more than loading up the payroll tax/unemployment benefit legislation with poison pills, they naturally want a conference, not to resolve issues, but to create more delay through intransigence. Also, counterintuitively, and counterproductively, they hope to embarrass the GOP Senate, with whom they now appear to be in open conflict. I worked on Capitol Hill with members of both Houses of Congress for a nearly a quarter century, and I understand this internecine warfare. It’s part of the expanding and contracting of relative strength within parties. It’s used by both sides, yet never so irresponsibly, capriciously, and aggressively as the present GOP House. Conservatives? Revolutionaries.
After reaching agreement on the two-month extension, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and the rest of the bunch left town last Saturday vowing to not discuss anything until the House approves the two-month extension. A few minutes ago, that possibility vanished. So, who knows what’s next? The conference committee, perhaps before January 1st? Well, whenever it convenes, in the end, the House conferees will characteristically shout “Havoc!” and unleash their yapping dogs. In the end, the conference will likely be as useful and unsuccessful as was the vaunted Supercommittee. . . Yadda Yadda Yadda . .
More Insult, More Injury. What really rankles though is Cantor and other GOP Congressloons using against him the President’s encouragement of a year-long extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. Remember, the Senate just passed the two-month solution with GOP support, including Mitch McConnell who agrees with nothing but unseating President Obama in November 2012. This bipartisan agreement was a major achievement. Today, the House GOP, however, refused to agree, not with Democrats, but with its own Senate minority. In any event, after packing the House proposal with poison pills, and then passing it over the administration’s objections, you are at least morally prohibited from trying to obscure your dishonesty by trying to implicate the president in your plans, as Cantor does now when he says, “even the President wanted a full year solution, so we’re simply doing what the president requested.” That is the very definition of flapdoodle.
The one-year extension Cantor refers to was simply the cherry on the top, not the underlying “cake” of what the President advocated for. He – and then the Senate with a huge plurality – reached a simple solution, for now, not a final solution, forever. The Senate produced what was rational, providing 34 pages of simple language to close the gap for the holidays and thereby keep the payroll tax reduction in place until Congress returns in late January. Then, there’s time to battle. The House, with neither embarrassment nor honesty, and with insincere Tea Party Christmas spirit, handed the President, their own senate colleagues, and the American people their own HR 3630, a 370 page insult, with a cherry of injury atop.
