Payne: Rep. Camp back at the cliff

Posted by hpayne on December 26, 2012

“This is consensus on a very intractable issue: What do we do about expiring tax policy?” thrilled Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, two years ago when President Obama and new House Republican majority agreed to avert the fiscal cliff of 2010 by extending all the Bush-era tax cuts.

Camp was encouraged not only by the crisis diverted but by the hope for future tax reform “because of the process of coming together and reaching an agreement. I am very encouraged by what the president has been saying publicly. They do want to begin (tax reform) and that is a big thing.”

It was a misreading of his Democratic adversary.

In fact, Obama followed his 2010 compromise – signed in the face of the GOP’s landslide, tea party-led Congressional gains and ferocious Democratic opposition including Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – by immediately hitting the campaign trail, rejecting the Simpson-Bowles tax reform commission, creating the 2011 debt talks crisis, and generally re-arming for the 2012 presidential campaign.

And so here we are back at the same fiscal cliff two years later.

As 2010 showed, the fiscal cliff solution is simple: Settle financial markets with a compromise extending Republican tax rates – and Democratic stimulus spending – and then return to the table once blood pressures have cooled for comprehensive budget-tax reform.

But this time, Obama is in no mood for compromise.

This is a smash-mouth presidency (not unlike the crisis-to-crisis Granholm gubernatorial years) about short-term political scores, not long-term solutions. And this time Obama has claimed the upper hand in the wake of his 2012 election win. Never mind that Republicans also won, maintaining the status quo that should augur for a 2010-style compromise.

“You get nothing. I get that for free,” Obama told compromise-minded Boehner after the House Majority Leader put $800 billion in tax revenue through closed loopholes on the table, reports The Wall Street Journal.

As in 2010, Republicans like Camp and Boehner are still operating under the assumption that President Obama wants long-term fixes – to the tax code, to the debt crisis, to trillion-dollar deficits.

But as the two years since 2010 prove, Obama is interested only in winning, not solutions (he has never put serious spending reductions on the table). And though his 2012 “win” was hardly as clear-cut as he claims – and certainly not the mandate the GOP had after the 2010 mid-terms – he and his media have declared it so. Together with Democratic rank-and-file resistance to another 2010-style compromise (then, Democratic leaders refused to even appear at the signing ceremony), Obama feels that he will win this round of brinkmanship (and he will if Republicans are thick enough to let tax cuts expire for everyone).

Rep. Camp may have thought he heard signs of bipartisanship in 2010 – but it was the sound of one hand clapping.

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