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Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:50 AM EST
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) became a member of a strange, losing group of 15 senators yesterday who opposed President Obama's tax deal with Republicans. Any club that's got Mr. Sanders at one end and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) at the other is likely covering way too much ground to be real in any ordinary sense of the word. Mr. Sanders, of course, comes to his opposition from the very real, very chartable reasoning that giving more to the rich doesn't make more for everyone else. It makes less, as he argued for more than eight hours on the Senate floor last week:
"Over the eight-year period of President Bush from 2001 to 2009, we lost 600,000 private sector jobs. So, for my friends, my Republican colleagues, to tell us that we need more tax breaks for the very rich because that's going to create jobs, that`s what trickle down economics is all about -- what I would say to them, you had your chance, it failed.
Now House Democrats take up the Great Tax Cave-in Compromise, with as the New York Times puts it, plenty of "pressure" on them. The economic arguments and the political ones diverge here, so that Austan Goolsbee can tell you President Obama got enough in the deal to grow the economy, and House Democrats can tell the president no, because they believe the deal is wrong.
Watch closely, now, because what's happening this week is going to keep playing out from here all the way to you-know-when. "I know it is an unspoken Beltway rule that liberal arguments don't bear repeating, that liberals are always supposed to be represented in the media as incoherent, " Rachel Maddow said on the show last night. "But as a frequently incoherent and inexplicably angry liberal myself, I can say with confidence that in this instance, what liberals are thinking and arguing is very much explicable. And the divide between what Democrats say they value and what they are able to achieve politically is an important and an emotional divide that will persist as a cleft in the Democratic Party from here on out, even if this tax deal passes. And that will be very important in understanding U.S. tax politics between now and 2012."
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