Is Hot Bag of Air That Is Grover Norquist Finally Floating Away?

According to a lot of press lately, which was even accompanied by some minor scolding from his own party, it seems as if Grover Norquist might be losing his kung-fu grip on the balls of the republican party when it comes to anything and everything involving his favorite four letter word... tax. But in the harsh light in the post-election morning, GOP politicians are beginning to realize that the napoleonic GOP tax emperor has no clothes. Or more realistically considering the climate and how the Republicans are polling against the President on the so-called fiscal cliff, they realize that threat of Mr. Norquist holding (most of) their previous anti-tax pledges against them in a future primary battle is rather hollow in the face of refusing to let the Bush tax cuts expire against the highest two tax brackets (I am not even going to get hysterically started on how the Bush tax cuts were ALWAYS supposed to sunset after 10 years). The majority of people support the raising of the wealthiest and most will also blame the GOP if a deal gets done. The bet being made many is that it is a lot more dangerous to the electoral prospects of those involved to obey Grover rather than to ignore him.

The party has not put Grover in the corner yet, however. He is now trying to use the debt ceiling to get what he, and many far-right conservatives in the House as well (to be fair), wants on the fiscal cliff. Boehner has now even stated that "everything has a price" as an barely implicit threat to use the debt ceiling despite the fact that it threatens the full faith and credit of the US, led to a downgrade of the US' credit rating last year and 60% of Americans support raising taxes on the top 2% of Americans (oh, and that little 332 and 51% election win by POTUS).

Due to that last bit, and because the majority of Americans will blame the Republican Party for a failure to avert the fiscal cliff, the President is refusing to back down from either his promise to raise taxes on the top 2% OR his conviction to take the debt ceiling off the table for the future so it can no longer be used as a threat nuclear option bargaining chip by the GOP. As President Obama still appears to have a massive chip stack in front of him, it strikes me as the right play. Not only is the raising of taxes on the wealthiest something he ran hard on and won on this fall, but the debt ceiling argument last year cast a black cloud over the United States last year. The President did not get overly blamed on that, but it still caused many to doubt the sanity of the political process. These negotiations during this lame duck session may be an important step to illustrate that this past election was the first sign that sanity is starting to creep back into our Congressional halls.

Here's to hoping, because the world is still watching. Maybe only with one eye because they have their own shit going on over in the EU and China, but watching nonetheless.

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