But, folks, look. How many days now, are we up to two years yet that the Democrats have not presented a budget? I mean forget a super committee deal on spending, how many days in a row now are we up to that the Democrats have not presented a budget? We aren't gonna get anything that smacks of any kind of budget reform from now until the election. It's not gonna happen until after the election. And I can't emphasize this enough. As far as Obama's concerned, they can't run on his record. He can't do it. He's gotta run against the Republicans, and the only way he can do that's run against the do-nothing Congress. Therefore the Congress can't do anything, it can't be permitted to do anything. Plain and simple. There was never going to be a deal. That's why the Democrats on that committee were appointed. They are not there to come up with a deal.
Everybody running around saying the committee is a failure, super committee a failure. How can they say it failed?
The super committee did exactly what it was supposed to do. It turned the issue from spending cuts to tax increases. Isn't that what everybody's talking about? There aren't any spending cuts. And the reason nobody's talking about spending cuts is because there aren't any. Especially with the baseline budgeting, there's no reduction in spending here, even if they had come up with an agreement to reduce spending. It's just a reduction of what's been agreed to be spent, but it's still more than what was spent last year. There's no cut here. So what they successfully did here was turn the issue from spending cuts to tax increases. Now they're talking about the Bush tax cuts, how we need to raise taxes on the rich. That's what their purpose was, because it's a campaign tool and it preserved Obama's plan to run against a do-nothing Congress, a do-nothing Republican House of Representatives, essentially. That's what Obama's gonna run against, a do-nothing Republican House. But that's not failure to the left.
So to me the news is not that the super committee failed here. It's that anybody in their right mind is surprised they failed. This is exactly what was supposed to happen. Now, I don't know on the Republican side, for example, I know Louie Gohmert knows what's going on. I'm pretty sure Hensarling knows, but some of these others, in all honesty I ask, did they really think they were gonna get some kind of a deal out of this? Even if they had caved, and they tried to, as a test, they gave the Democrats $300 billion in new tax revenue.
Now, I don't know if they did that as a technique to be able to illustrate that the Democrats didn't want a deal, or if the Republicans did that because they really thought the world was ganging up on 'em and they were gonna get blamed if there's no deal, so okay, let's offer some little tax increases here. I don't know. But it was rejected anyway. Because it was never going to be accepted. Now, Republicans might have been able to propose something so outrageous that the Democrats would have to call Obama and say, "Do we really want to reject this?" They might have accepted a total cave, but that didn't happen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This McCain quote fascinates me, and I've gotta remember the details. There was a Wall Street Journal editorial. It was on July 27th, 2011. "The GOP's Reality Test -- Republicans who oppose Boehner's debt deal are playing into Obama's hands." This is the Journal wanted everybody to go along with the deal that Boehner and Obama were making on raising the debt ceiling. It was not a good deal. It was bad; it's what led to the super committee. And McCain loved the column. McCain loved it, and he went to the floor of the Senate to read an excerpt from it.
MCCAIN: The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against Barack Obama. The Republican House had failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all the blame then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the Tea Party hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor. This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.
RUSH: Yeah, now is it all coming back into focus? Now do you remember, folks? That's July 27th, 2011. You remember all this now? This is they hated O'Donnell, they hated Angle in 2010. They were still burning inside the Beltway and the establishment over Angle and Christine O'Donnell winning nomination fights, primary elections in Nevada and in Delaware. So the thinking was, "If we don't go along with this, the Democrats are gonna smoke us, and they're gonna do an end run around us. They're gonna win everything. They would pass a balanced budget amendment, reform entitlements." We just passed a balanced budget...? No! Thank God we didn't pass a balanced budget amendment. I say thank God we "didn't" pass this balanced budget, not this one.
Yeah. The one that was voted on went down in flames, and thank God it did, because it took... You know, Cut, Cap, and Balance was our idea. They took the "cut" and "cap" out of it, essentially. There was no cap on spending. This is the thing that was voted on last week that four Republicans voted against. People said, "Who are these people?" They're heroes, that's who they are! Paul Ryan is one of them. There wasn't any cap on spending, and they took out the two-thirds majority necessary to vote a tax increase. They took that out! The Republicans took that out of the balanced budget amendment. So raising taxes would have been a snap. Paul Ryan voted "no," said that it would result "in massive spending and tax increases." Which it would have. There was no cap; there was no cut; there was just (ostensibly) the balanced budget.
