House Republicans left town in disarray on the evening of Thursday, December 21, after rejecting Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B.” That bill would have avoided the tax cliff in January even as it allowed tax rates to rise for millionaires. (A separate bill, which did pass the House, would turn off the “sequester” as it applies to the defense budget.) If Plan B had passed, House Republicans could have told their constituents that they had approved a bill to prevent a massive 2013 tax hike on most taxpayers even as they acceded to the president’s demand to raise taxes on the rich. With Plan B in hand, Boehner would have been in a much more favorable position to negotiate with Senate majority leader Harry Reid over a possible final compromise.
Alas, it was not to be, for reasons that remain hard to fathom. It is certainly understandable that House Republicans want to avoid voting to raise taxes. But they must know that they are about to get a whopping, and probably irreversible, tax increase forced on their constituents in part because of their unwillingness to demonstrate any tactical agility in this difficult struggle. After Thursday night, the tax bill that will ultimately get handed off to American households has almost certainly gone up rather than down.
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