Pelosi is sitting in the spacious office she now occupies as House minority leader. She?s quick to note that this didn?t used to be the minority leader?s office; it used to be the speaker?s office. Tip O?Neill was in it, and so was Tom Foley. ?We don?t lack for the accouterments of power,? she says. ?We just lack for power.?
It sounds depressing, but she doesn?t sound particularly depressed. Rather, she sounds, as she usually does in public, relentlessly on message. Asked whether she?s looking for a middle ground with the Republicans on the continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government, she says she?s interested ? ?so long as the middle ground is on a higher ground.? But ?if they propose kicking 6 million homebound seniors off of the Meals on Wheels program, is the right middle ground kicking 3 million off? No, that?s not where we?re going.? During the hour-long interview, she probably repeats some version of this ?higher ground, not middle ground? mantra a dozen times.
You can?t blame her for focusing on message. Message is what she?s got. The House is not the Senate, of course. There is no filibuster, and so Pelosi does not have the sort of leverage that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has. But she and the Democrats have more leverage than might be expected. House Speaker John Boehner?s difficulty wrangling votes in his own party has forced him to rely on Democratic votes far more frequently than Pelosi needed Republicans. If he?s going to avoid shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt, he?s going to need some Democrats to stand with him. As of yet, Pelosi says, she?s not been whipping those votes. But she eventually could. And during the hour-long interview, she slipped in a preview of one of the items she?ll demand during the budget debate: tax expenditures, which she?s taken to calling ?tax earmarks.?
?The Fiscal Commission had many things to recommend it,? Pelosi says. ?One of them was what they called ?revenue earmarks.? Everyone talks about earmarks as budget busters, but the big budget busters are the earmarks in the tax code that we need to simplify and make more fair. Those are the big expenses, and we get nothing from it. They don?t create jobs or strengthen the middle class.?
I?m not sure the country is as down on tax expenditures as Pelosi is: The mortgage-interest deduction and the exclusion for employer-provided health care are much-beloved by the middle class, even if they?re undeniably regressive policies. But she?s right that they?re a much bigger pot of money than non-defense discretionary spending. As you can see in this graph, they?re a bigger pot of money, at least for the moment, than Medicare and Medicaid. And it?d be good policy if Democrats demanded that Boehner that they get trimmed as part of the cost of doing any sort of deficit-reduction deal.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=ca21be962282eafc1c7aa195ba686b04
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