Far Right Tries To Grab Credit For Fiscal Cliff Deal

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(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

The Daily Caller (a conservative pseudo-news site) is welcoming the new year with a headline that might end up as one of the most absurd of 2013: "House Republicans pass Senate fiscal cliff deal, send it off to president for approval."

Hold on, you might think. I know that the House passed the Senate bill to prevent the fiscal cliff, a deal worked out by Vice President Biden and Senator McConnell, but weren't the House Republicans so dysfunctional that they were unable to pass their own bill, let alone one that compromised with the Democrats in the Senate and the White House? Why then did House Republicans pass this compromise bill?

That's a good question, and the answer is that they didn't, not under any definition used by intelligent humans who understand the workings of the United States Congress.

It's true that Republicans control Congress, and so under hyper-partisan rules Speaker Boehner is able to block bills that don't have the approval of a "majority of the majority" (i.e. a majority of the Republicans). However, in this case Boehner pre-pledged to actually try to help govern the country, rather than working for the far-right extremists, by letting any bill passed by the Senate go to a vote on the House floor. After the Senate passed the Biden-McConnell deal 89-8, showing what I would call remarkable maturity if it had happened two weeks ago, Boehner was stuck. He had to let his members vote on it, rather than exercising his dictator-like powers to table it, or else be blamed for singlehandedly allowing drastic cuts to important programs and tax hikes for everyone.

So now we come to the House vote. Unlike the Senate, the vote was not nearly unanimous. It was 257-167. How did that break down? Democrats voted in favor 172-16, and Republicans voted against 85-151.

In other words, 91% of voting Democrats supported the bill, while only 36% of voting Republicans did. Democrats provided 80% of the 213 votes necessary to pass the bill, and 67% of the votes actually cast in favor of it. Republicans alone would have provided only 40% of the votes necessary to pass the bill, and 33% of the votes actually cast in favor. Additionally, it turns out (unsurprisingly) that most of the Republican votes in favor of the deal came from those Republicans most removed from the GOP establishment (and the far-right extremists) by their personal electoral realities: they mainly come from closely divided districts and blue states where demonstrating a willingness to help govern the country (rather than pander to the Tea Party) may actually help them keep their seats in 2014.

So, in light of those facts, how is it possible to say that House Republicans passed the Senate fiscal cliff deal? As far as I can see, the only way is to be a hyper-partisan organization that exists only to help elect Republicans to office, but wants to do so under the cover of pretending to be a news organization. Move over, Fox News.