— around Obama that is now necessary to ward off disaster for the Democratic Party.
Reid co-sponsors Bernie Sanders’ Strengthen Social Security Act, which requires the income of the wealthiest Americans be taxed just like everyone else’s. That would, of course, completely ameliorate any shortfall Social Security faces, without any need for reducing seniors’ $15,000 a year benefits.
Peter DeFazio has introduced a companion bill in the House.
Reid is hardly the most effective majority leader. You feel it’s more important to him to preserve schmoozing rights with the opposition than exerting himself to tame them.
Nevertheless—he apparently understands that Obama is out of control in his zeal to cut Social Security benfits, do the Republicans’ work for them, and set up his own party to take the fall.
And Reid has seen it play out over and over — in December 2010, when Obama said he just was’t in the mood for a fight with the Repulicans and so he’d keep the Bush tax cus in place.
And Reid recalls being side swiped by Obama in 2009, when the President sent Rahm Emanuel over to Reid’s office and demanded that the pubic option be taken out of the bill that Reid had already presented.
And let’s not even mention, but we will, Obama’s disastrous cave/collusion with the Repulicans in 2011 that brought us humungous cuts to social services, no new revenues, and brought us as well that little sequester thing.
And, oh, yes, the terrible fiscal cliff deal; Reid was similarly dissed and excluded by the President on that one, too.
It has got to stop and we can only hope that Reid joining forces with Sanders means that it will.