The blame here is that the republican leader is responsible for presenting the republican plan, and there is no republican plan.
If you are going to say that the democrats have a bad plan, you need to put out your own plan. Right now, they can’t vote on the alternate republican plan, because there is no alternate republican plan.
Boehner instead has decided to skip the whole “pass a republican plan”, and go straight to “get an agreement so we only have to vote on that”.
I believe politically his thought is that if they only vote for the compromise, it can’t be held against them by democrats in 2014, and that republicans will be so outraged by the democrats and obamacare by then that they will vote republican no matter what happens.
If they instead pass their own plan, it will have to have significant cuts, especially if they are trying to replace the defense cuts with other cuts. Every cut will be highlighted the next two years to show how republicans hate the poor and middle class, and were willing to destroy them to help keep rich people happy.
Boehner thinks first that this could hurt us, and that somehow if he plays this right, the democrats WON’T just say those things anyway.
Flake appears to be saying that he just wants to stop playing games, and present the actual plan we have, no matter how unpopular it is. Lets vote on it, so we can say we tried, before we compromise.
Boehner could have easily outflanked obama by agreeing to “tax the rich”. There simply are not enough of them. Barry needs the middle class tax increases to pay for kenyancare and obama phones. Why the GOP isn’t shouting that into every microphone I have no idea.
This is a real war on the middle class. The GOP needs to join the dims in gutter and fight back with the facts.