Too bad, Tea Partiers!

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Looks like we ought to let Biden and McConnell take over altogether!  Between the two of them they worked out a bill that even the Tea Party had to accept because "The Senate had left the House with little choice: Accept this path to avert the cliff, or there would be no other."
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'Fiscal Cliff': Congress Approves Compromise Aimed at Averting Recession
By Devin Dwyer, John Parkinson and Sunlen Miller, January 1, 2013

The House of Representatives has approved a bipartisan Senate deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" and preserve Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans making less than $400,000 per year.

The compromise is now on its way to President Obama for his signature.

"I will sign a law that raises taxes on the wealthiest two percent of Americans while preventing a middle class tax hike that could have sent the economy back into recession and obviously had a severe impact on families all across America," said Obama, who was joined by his top negotiator, Vice President Joe Biden, for late-night televised remarks after the House vote.

"Under this law, more than 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses will not see their income taxes go up," he added. "A central premise of my campaign for president was to change the tax code that was too skewed towards the wealthy at the expense of working middle-class Americans."

House Republicans agreed to the up-or-down vote Tuesday evening, despite earlier talk of trying to amend the Senate bill with more spending cuts before taking a vote. The bill delays for two months tough decisions about automatic spending cuts that were set to kick in Wednesday.

A majority of the Republicans in the GOP-majority House voted against the fiscal cliff deal. About twice as many Democrats voted in favor of the deal compared to Republicans. One hundred fifty-one Republicans joined 16 Democrats to vote against the deal, while 172 Democrats carried the vote along with 85 Republicans.

The Senate passed the same bill by an 89-8 vote in the wee hours of New Year's Day. If House Republicans had tweaked the legislation, there would have been no clear path for its return to the Senate before a new Congress is sworn in Thursday.

The vote split Republican leaders in the House. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, voted yes, and so did the GOP's 2012 vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

But House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., the No. 2 Republican in the House, voted no. It was his opposition that had made passage of the bill seem unlikely earlier in the day.

The deal does little to address the nation's long-term debt woes and does not entirely solve the problem of the "fiscal cliff."

Indeed, the last-minute compromise -- far short from a so-called grand bargain on deficit reduction -- sets up a new showdown on the same spending cuts in two months amplified by a brewing fight on how to raise the debt ceiling beyond $16.4 trillion. That new fiscal battle has the potential to eclipse the "fiscal cliff" in short order.

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Tea party backers swallow a bitter pill in ‘cliff’ bill
By David A. Fahrenthold, Rosalind S. Helderman and Ed O’Keefe, January 1, 2013

The bill was 153 pages long. It was written only the day before, by Washington insiders working in the dark of night. It was crammed with giveaways and legislative spare parts: tax breaks for wind farms and racetracks. A change to nuclear-weapons policy. Government payments for cheese.

And, most significantly, the bill will raise taxes but do relatively little to cut government spending or the massive federal deficit.

To a tea-party-influenced crop of House Republicans, the bill to resolve the “fiscal cliff” crisis was everything they had wanted to change about the way Washington worked. Too rushed. Too bloated. Too secretive. Too expensive.

“There’s lots and lots of pork in this bill,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), one of its most outspoken opponents.

On Tuesday, however, it passed on their watch. After the Senate approved the compromise, it briefly appeared that the GOP-led House would rebel against the bill. But the threat faded: For many Republicans, it appeared, the risk of rejecting the bill — and courting economic calamity — outweighed their unhappiness with the bill’s contents.

The fiscal-cliff bargain had been worked out on the phone by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two 70-year-olds with a combined 68 years in office in Washington. They stepped in after President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) tried, and failed , to reach a far-reaching agreement to tackle the debt.

Instead, McConnell and Biden lowered their ambitions and cut a “small deal.” It will raise marginal tax rates only for a sliver of high-earning individuals and avert a massive budget cut by pushing it back for two months.

But “small” was really not the the best description. The bill carries a substantial cost.

Although it will raise some taxes, it also will extend the vast majority of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts, as well as loopholes for many businesses. In all, the bill will cause deficits to rise by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But that estimated increase is based on the massive tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to take effect without a resolution to the fiscal cliff.

House Republicans wanted the Bush tax cuts to be extended. But they had also wanted big spending cuts. To many conservatives among them, the bill looked like a massive failure of will.

“To pass something at 2 o’clock in the morning, when the senators didn’t even get a real good chance to look at it, we’re tired of that,” said Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), elected in 2010 and defeated in November. He faced the prospect of casting his final vote in Congress on this package.

“I think it’s important to do it right. There’s a lot of us who feel that way. This is what we did with Obamacare — now look what we’re living with,” Walsh said, referring to the health-care law. “We don’t want to do that again.”

The bill that McConnell and Biden crafted was also not small in a physical sense. It ran to more than 24,000 words of small type. And many of those words had nothing to do with the marquee controversies of the fiscal cliff.

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