Tax Cut Kabuki
Jules Witcover

In the slow waltz on Capitol Hill over extending or dropping the Bush tax cuts due to expire at year's end, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid one-upped the House Republicans this week. He slipped through the Senate the Democratic plan to extend the cuts for the middle class while killing them on income over $250,000.

Reid did so via a parliamentary maneuver whereby the issue was decided by a straight majority rather than the two-thirds usually required to avoid a filibuster. The measure passed, 51-48, with Democratic votes. The House Republicans, who only recently had staged another showcase vote defeating the tax-the-rich scheme, had assumed the Senate Democrats would have to be recorded voting against the House bill.

It's all, of course, part of the 2012 election dance over which party cares most about the middle class that is seen as the key battleground in November, for the presidency and control of Congress. The prospect now is for continued House-Senate stalemate, possibly until an 11th-hour extension of all the cuts, solving nothing.

For what it's worth, Reid's gambit enables the Democrats for the time being to cast the Republicans as willing to throw the middle-class baby out with the bath water just to save the cuts for income over $250,000, affecting 2 percent of taxpayers.

The Bush tax cuts were enacted nearly a decade ago as, if you'll pardon the expression, a stimulus of federal dollars to middle-class and upper-income Americans to spur buying and hence economic growth. The Democratic argument now is that the middle class still needs the cuts desperately but the rich are doing fine as usual.

The debate neatly dovetails, if implicitly, with the Obama-Romney fight for the Oval Office: Obama is the bleeding-heart liberal advocate of government largesse to the middle class; Romney is the Daddy Warbucks business tycoon looking out for his well-heeled peers. Obama is the plodding grasshopper, Romney the Wall Street magician ready to pull prosperity out of a hat.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the vote, saying it was not a serious endeavor "because it is not going anywhere," given the strong Republican sentiment in the GOP-controlled House. But House Speaker Boehner used exactly the same gambit repeatedly in pushing through his party's legislation to extend all the Bush tax cuts for another year. Obama dismissed the House Republican plan as "another 1 trillion dollar giveaway to the wealthiest Americans."

The determination of the Senate Democrats to cast the blame for inaction on the House Republicans was seen in the rare appearance of Vice President Joe Biden in his constitutional role as president of the Senate, with his sole power to break a tie vote. He came off the campaign trail to sit in on the vote, though his presence wasn't needed.

During the debate, in which the presiding officer is barred from participating, McConnell chided the customarily loquacious Biden on his forced silence. The vice president just grinned as the Republican version was defeated by a vote of 54 to 45 and the Democratic proposal passed.

And so the presidential campaign drags on through the hot summer months not only on the speaking tours of the two candidates and their surrogates and in Congress. Every aspect now seems narrowed to the kind of class warfare that both sides say they deplore but continue to wage. Obama casts it in terms of Romney as the rich product of Wall Street manipulation and the outsourcing of middle-class jobs, hanging his tenure as boss of Bain Capital around his neck.

Romney in turn insists that Obama denigrates capitalism, twisting one of the president's recent remarks to suggest that the president asserted that small businessmen didn't "build" their enterprises. He ignores Obama's point that road-building and other infrastructure maintenance paid for by taxpayers have made them partners in the success.

And so they go on, like two weary boxers holding on in the clinches, waiting for the bell to ring ending another indecisive round. A lot of us, meanwhile, await with diminishing interest the conventions, the candidate debates and the end of it all in November.

 

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Tax Cut Kabuki | Politics

 

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