Dems choose political battle

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

In the year-end tax debate of 2010, President Barack Obama got the economic stimulus he sought, and Democrats in Congress settled for picking a political fight.

Far more quietly, Republicans pocketed a two-year extension of George W. Bush-era tax cuts at all income levels and a sweetened estate tax to go with it, without having to swallow billions in public- works spending that would have inflamed their tea- party supporters.

By the time Obama had signed the bill Friday, he and Rep. Eric Cantor, the conservative Virginian in line to become House majority leader, could have read entire sections of each other’s speeches.

“This tax deal is not perfect, and nearly all of us, myself included, disagree with certain elements of this bill,” Cantor said Thursday night before the legislation cleared Congress, echoing what the president said at the signing ceremony.

The bill was “prompted by the fact that tax rates for every American were poised to automatically increase” Jan. 1, Obama said Friday. “That wouldn’t have just been a blow to them — it would have been a blow to our economy just as we’re climbing out of a devastating recession.”

Cantor had put it this way: “The choice is to act now or impose the onset of a$3.8 trillion tax increase that will crush the fragile recovery and cost tens of thousands of jobs nationally.”

It was, as Florida Republican Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite said in the House, “a bipartisan moment of clarity.”

It won’t last.

Republicans will be in a position to pay less deference to the Democrats in Congress beginning in January, when the GOP takes control of the House and adds seats in the Senate. Cantor, Ohio Rep. John Boehner, who’s expected to become speaker, and the rest of the new Republican House majority will be eager to make a show of cutting spending, more than Obama will support and much more than most Democrats will consider.

In fact, the alignment of political forces that led to the tax bill could reoccur before the 2012 elections if the president and Republicans leaders decide it’s in their mutual interest to rein in federal deficits.

For now, the compromise underscored the change in government the voters decreed at midterm elections Nov. 2.