Once again congressional Republicans figure out the very least the White House will settle for and extort a whopping price for even LESS

President Obama made some kind of statement today about the deal approved today in a series of votes by Senate Dems and Republicans. I didn't really pay much attention. Did anyone?

"We're stunned that the president would say one week that he's going to veto any provision that includes Keystone, and then cave the next week. Where I come from, people don't do that, but I guess this is Washington."

-- Bill McKibben, on the Senate's proposed revenue-package "compromise"

“'We’ll be back discussing the same issues in a couple months,' Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday.
"Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) vowed late Friday that Democrats would spend the next two months pushing for a full-year extension."

-- from a washingtonpost.com report today, "Senate votes to extend payroll tax cut, keep government open"

by Ken

Confidential to Bill McKibben: Hey, man, where exactly do you come from, that you're all "stunned" about the president caving, and so quickly? Or did you perhaps mean something along the lines of "We're stunned but not surprised"?

So, ladies and germs, the Senate, at least, has reached a "deal" on the revenue package which will keep the government going for . . . well, for two months. I guess you could say this is participatory democracy at its finest, where we the people are so in control of our government that we don't fund it in larger than two-month increments. (I like the nytimes.com head on Jennifer Steinhauer's post latest post on today's Senate voting: "True to Form, Senate Punts on Payroll Tax.")

The washingtonpost.com report was accompanied by a photo from yesterday of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in case you were wondering who's driving this particular bus. He was seen leaving his office yesterday, presumably after signing off on the deal that authorizes extension of the payroll-tax cut for two months, in exchange for forcing the White House to speed up its decision-making process on the Keystone XL pipeline, for which the Republicans' energy-industry paymasters want very badly to ram through government approval. Now, as the Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Paul Kane explain, "Under the agreement, Congress would approve language requiring that a construction permit be issued for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days unless the president determined the pipeline was not in the national interest."

As Senator McConnell pointed out last night, "We'll be discussing the same issues in a couple months." Or maybe sooner. Hard as it was to broker this deal covering a mere two months -- the dream was for a deal that would have covered a pie-in-the-sky 11 months, but that was beyond reach -- there's still no assurance that the ultra-cuckoos in the House will go along.

Nevertheless, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer last night declared the deal a "significant victory": "The president said that Congress cannot go home without preventing a tax increase on 160 million hard-working Americans, and the deal announced tonight meets that test." I shudder to think what else is in the deal. It's clear that the White House determined that for its public-relations agenda it needed that one thing, the payroll-tax-cut extension. The cruel irony is that, for all that it's couched as an issue for "160 million hard-working Americans," it's really an anchor around the neck of Social Security.

Hey, don't get me wrong, as I try to calculate what my paychecks will look like come January, I'm not sorry to be paying the lower payroll-tax rates. Still, the fact remains that the longer the payroll-tax cut is in place, the more money has to be channeled to Social Security by Congress, and a program that until now has paid its own way, and that has never been part of the deficit, will soon become a growing burden by phony demagogic means -- namely, outright diverting the money that's designed to pay for it.

The two-month deal, with the apparent obligation to do something about the pipeline question in that time frame, is awkward for the administration. I've been dubious that the Obama people have, or ever had, any intention of squelching the pipeline. The "accomplishment" of the deal they thought they had in place was that the decision could have been postponed until after the election.

I suppose it's actually possible, just possible, that the accelerated schedule could make the administration susceptible to environmental-activist pressure. Clearly they didn't want to have to go into the election having to defend the pipeline. Now I guess we'll see just how potentially damaging they think the issue might be. My guess is "not all that much," when you weigh the potential wrath of the energy industry wrath, which can be expressed so easily in the form of giving and withholding those massive stockpiles of campaign cash. Still, the NYT's Jennifer Steinhauer notes in her report:

The State Department has already put off a decision on Keystone pending changes in the route and further environmental reviews, and has indicated that any attempts to hasten the project will most likely result in its disapproval, a warning which White House officials gleefully repeated time and again on Saturday.

Let's just hope things don't get worse before the House signs off on a "deal." The potential is certainly there, though. Congressional Republicans have shown themselves pretty skilled at figuring out the very least the Obama administration is willing to settle for and then making them pay (or should I say making us pay?) through the nose for somewhat less.

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