Free Republic

The debt ceiling deal will pass the Senate early this afternoon. No suspense there. But the vote will be worth watching for another reason: Three Republican Senate sources tell TWS that senators who vote against the deal will be ineligible to serve on the so-called “supercommittee” for deficit reduction that the legislation creates

(snip) Despite what many DC “conservatives” say, such as Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post PDSer who recently called House members fighting for fiscal sanity extremists, Obama actually can raise taxes under the guise of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. This will result in a tax increase of $800 billion to as much as $3.5 trillion if all Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire. This kind of crap is what happens when deals are cobbled together in the dark of night. We have to pass it to see what’s in it, which the House just did. So much...

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that President Obama’s debt ceiling plan is the best-known option at this point. There’s just one problem with that: No publicly available, detailed Obama plan exists. “There is no plan that has been offered, certainly in the last several months, about which more detail is known or has been specified than the Obama-Boehner plan, okay, in terms of the cuts in domestic spending, both defense and non-defense discretionary; the savings coming out of entitlements programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; the kind of tax reform that was envisioned and the mechanisms...

Late last week, it looked like Tom Coburn might rejoin the Gang of Six in the Senate, which restarted their efforts to find a compromise on the budget as the debt-ceiling limit debate rages. Today, however, Coburn will become a Gang of One by releasing his own plan to reduce the deficit by twice the amount of the Paul Ryan plan. Unlike Ryan, Coburn plans on increasing federal revenues, but through reform of the tax code: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said Sunday the federal government can save $1 trillion though tax reform, a proposal that will put him at odds...