12/11/2023 0 Comments Bernie sanders log flume![]() The rich have got it all right now,' " Sanders thought the deal could be scuttled.įormer President Clinton speaks to the press with President Obama in the White House Briefing Room on Dec. "And if the American people stand up and work with us, if they get on the phones - if they call up their senators, if they call up their congressmen - if they make their voices heard and said, 'Enough is enough. We can do better," he said several hours in. He kept urging people to call Congress to complain. "The polls show us the American people do not believe millionaires and billionaires need more tax breaks," he said at one point.Īnd, foreshadowing his future presidential campaigns, Sanders made a point to talk past the other lawmakers - who he likely realized were mostly going to vote for the bipartisan deal. Sanders kept circling back to two main points as the speech went on.įirst, that public opinion was on his side. Ted Cruz's reading Green Eggs And Ham during an hours-long anti-Obamacare speech in 2013 - so he, Gunnels and other staffers hammered out several general "refrains" that the senator would keep returning to. Sanders didn't want to resort to any gimmicks - like Texas Sen. But you've got to wage the fight before you compromise. ![]() But he'd never spoken on the floor for eight hours." "He'd done a lot of hour speeches, a lot of half-hour speeches, a lot of 45-minute speeches. "We'd never done anything like this before," Gunnels said. "He wanted to plot out a strategy to do everything that we could to defeat that deal," said Gunnels, and the idea of a filibuster was born.Įven though Sanders said at the beginning of the speech that he wasn't out to set any records, Gunnels said the unofficial goal was to top an eight-hour mark that had been set years earlier by Nevada Sen. "He was very frustrated," recalled Warren Gunnels, a longtime Sanders staffer that the 2020 presidential campaign staff now jokingly refers to as the candidate's "chief of receipts." To Sanders, Obama's justifications sounded like something he was used to hearing from Republican presidents. "We'd never done anything like this before" Obama and Biden said the whole thing would help the still-recovering economy, and clear the way for a lot of other legislative business to get done by year's end. In return, Democrats got an extension of unemployment benefits and a range of broader tax cuts aimed at lower- and middle-income earners, including a temporary reduction in Social Security payroll taxes. Republicans got the Bush tax cuts extended for two more years - past the 2012 election. According to a Senate Republican aide, Biden and McConnell hammered out the agreement in several phone calls over the course of a single weekend. Obama tapped Biden to figure out a deal with McConnell, and the two men reached one relatively quickly. And here was the president, about a month later, asking his party for a major tax deal that would extend the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy - something Democrats had campaigned against for years. ![]() That December morning, Obama was already facing a lot of pressure.ĭemocrats had just lost the House of Representatives. ![]() Sanders' filibuster underscored a question that has become central to the current nomination battle: whether compromising to get things done, or fighting on principles, is the better way to chart political progress. The moment resonates nearly a decade later, as Sanders battles for the Democratic presidential nomination with the chief architect of the deal, Biden. "I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have to do a lot better than this agreement provides." You can call it a very long speech," Sanders said toward the top of his marathon. "You can call what I am doing today whatever you want. While Biden and President Obama argued that those concessions paved the way for Democratic priorities like an extension of unemployment benefits, Sanders didn't buy it. The agreement - which extended the Bush-era tax cuts that the Democratic Party had railed against for years, and lowered the estate tax threshold for the mega-wealthy - enraged progressives like Sanders. ![]()
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