Top Headline Comments 1-2-13

Happy Wednesday.

Rep. Paul Ryan on why he voted for the fiscal cliff deal: "I came to Congress to make tough decisions - not to run away from them." Alright, then. Two months from now he'll have another tough decision to make when the sequester cuts come due again. We're also due to run into the debt ceiling sometime between now and then.

The House has put off a vote on the Senate's bloated Sandy relief bill. House leadership had planned to confront it in two stages, with a scaled-back $21 billion bill just including things like actual Sandy relief, which was expected to have broad GOP support, and a $33 billion amendment including the Senate's pork, like money for fisheries in Alaska, which most of the GOP congressmen would vote against. I've heard it said that "emergency" legislation like this should be considered "must-pass," since it looks so bad not to, but that sounds like so much RINO bullshit to me.

A hacker group is claiming that it has stolen the entire subscriber list to the Lower Hudson Journal News, the paper that published the names and addresses of gun owners, and then posted the subscribers names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses online. William Jacobson has the details.

Back to the fiscal cliff, there's a lot of moaning about Republicans "paying the price" for yesterday's fiscal cliff drama, by which I mean not just the vote, but also the all-day Three Stooges routine put on by the House GOP. I don't think that's true. Most GOP members get to go back to their districts and say they voted against the plan, which will no doubt please their majority-GOP constituents. The ones that voted for the plan were already on solid ground in their more purple districts. They get to go back and say they averted tax hikes for their constituents.

Each of these two categories of Republican congressmen are going to count their actions as qualified victories when they seek reelection. So, of course, neither group has much incentive to change anything about the way they acted the next time around. Did I mention the sequester and debt ceiling debates are just around the corner?

posted by Gabriel Malor at 06:54 AM

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