Partisanship Blogging Warning. This post contains no academic content. What follows is a series of block quotes designed to illustrate the title of the post.
This is simply remarkable….
First, Erick Erickson at RedState:
The McConnell Tax Hike raises taxes on people making over $400,000.00, but it also raises taxes on the middle class. “More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes.”*
Not only does the McConnell Tax Hike stick it to the middle class, it raises taxes $41 for every $1 in spending cuts. Those spending cuts are ephemeral as there is $330 billion in new spending and a $4 trillion price tag over the next ten years.
Both Hollywood and NASCAR get carve outs. So too do wind energy companies.
Erickson, one of the “most influential” conservative bloggers continues:
The Republican Establishment in Washington, DC should be burned to the ground and salt spread on the remains. Republicans who saw Mitch McConnell and John Boehner destroy the last plank of the Republican Party are going to need to look elsewhere for a savior for their party. Boehner and McConnell have declared they will survive. Their party? They don’t really care.
Conservatives must look elsewhere. I do not advocate a third party. I advocate bring fresh blood into the GOP.
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the two men who will remain the faces of the GOP, have no agenda other than to oppose Barack Obama and accommodate him when they must.
Until Republicans have a new agenda, they will be stuck in the mud. But being stuck in the mud is not a bad place for them. It’ll make Republicans easier targets in 2014 primaries. Conservatives should not be wasting their time thinking of a third party right now. Instead, they should get very organized and very united and make examples of Republicans who wavered [emphasis added].
Second: Doug Mataconis, a self-described conservative blogger at Outside the Beltway:
I’ve spent far more time discussing politics on this New Year’s Day than I probably should, mostly with friends on the right who are vehemently opposed to this deal largely because it doesn’t accomplish everything they want. When I mention the fact that their position would mean that everyone’s income taxes would rise substantially and that, based on every analysis I’ve seen, the economy would likely enter recession no later than the third quarter of the year, the response seems to be rather cavalier. Even the Republican partisans don’t seem to recognize that a rejection of the deal by the House at this point would likely be a political disaster for the Republican Party. Most importantly, though, none of them seem to realize that the Republican Party only controls one half of one branch of the Federal Government at the moment. The fact that they control the House and are able to filibuster in the Senate gives them negotiating power, of course, but in the end the reality is that they are not going to get everything that they want in the current political environment. This means that compromise and deal making are inevitable [emphasis added].
Finally, from David Freedlander at The Daily Beast:
But after 85 House Republicans joined Boehner in raising taxes without spending reductions during the end game of Monday night’s fiscal-cliff negotiations, Tea Party leaders and conservative activists from around the country are dusting off their tri-corner hats and “Don’t Tread On Me” signs, and now say that their members are as energized as they have ever been since the first Tax Day protests in 2009. And the Republican Party, they add, had better beware.
“We now have 85 members of the House who have shunned their noses at us,” said Dustin Stockton, a Texas- and Nevada-based operative and the chief strategist of The Tea Party.net. “Our job now is to recruit and inspire and motivate people to run against those Republicans who did it.”
For Tea Partiers and fiscally conservative Republican rank-and filers, the Congress that ended its term this week was at last a chance to get federal spending under control. Hopes were high that this class, which more than doubled the number of members in the House’s Tea Party caucus on their first day, would repudiate previous Republican tendencies to reverse campaign promises and open up the spending spigot as soon as they had their hands on it. And if these newly minted members failed, the Tea Party promised to rally its energy behind new challengers who wouldn’t.
I just can’t wait for the debt-ceiling fight, can you?
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*Note that the “raises taxes on the middle class” link in the first block quote refers almost entirely to the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. which Republicans were so opposed to this that Democrats didn’t even bother to fight for it.
Although Eickson has been consistent since December on this point, his earlier position on payroll-tax cuts is much more difficult to pin down. Some brief searching on my part revealed that he has, in the past, suggested that the GOP offer to make the holiday permanent. But the purpose of his recommendation appears to be entirely tactical.
Indeed, on at least one occasion, he clearly opposes the payroll-tax holiday on the grounds that it (1) doesn’t help the economy and (2) must be offset elsewhere in the budget. Needless to say, conservatives generally opposed the payroll-tax holiday because, well, Obama proposed it. So make of this what you will.
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