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 Editorials | November 2007 
The Bush Era: The End Begins
 Max J. Castro - Progreso Weekly
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The George W. Bush era is not scheduled to end until January 2009, but already there are clear signs of the waning of the incumbent's power. Last week, for the first time since Bush became president, the U.S. Congress overrode a presidential veto.
The vote came on a bill funding a large number of water infrastructure projects across the country. It is the kind of legislation that members of both parties love to enact as elections approach. It is what in American politics is called "bringing home the bacon." Bush's embarrassing defeat, which required the defection of many Republicans, is a symptom of the president's weakness and the fear among GOP members of Congress - many of whom will be running for their political lives come November 2008.
While the water projects bill represents something that most Republicans either support or at least can live with, Democrats did not pause long to celebrate their victory before pushing through a piece of tax reform legislation that truly sticks in the craw of what presidential hopeful Mitt Romney calls "the Republican wing of the Republican party," in effect the GOP's dominant rightist faction.
It is no wonder that the Republicans are up in arms about the proposed tax law, passed last week in the House of Representatives by a 216 to 193 largely party-line vote. Over the last seven years, Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have engaged in an unacknowledged but intense class war through a whole set of laws and policies that have systematically favored the very rich. In contrast, the bill narrowly approved by the House would increase taxes significantly on a few thousand very wealthy hedge fund traders by closing a loophole in the current tax code they have been using to boost their already huge incomes to obscene levels. These revenues would be used to spare over twenty million middle class families from being hit by a scheduled tax increase averaging $2,000 a year without adding to the budget deficit.
The proposed change in the tax laws represents an attempt to fix flaws in the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), a law passed by Congress in 1969 to force wealthy taxpayers to pay some income tax. Before the AMT, some taxpayers could avoid paying any taxes by using the multiple loopholes provided in the tax code. However, the 1969 law failed to index the Alternative Minimum Tax. After nearly 40 years of inflation, the AMT will soon begin to hit middle class taxpayers Congress never intended to target with the law. Of course, Congress could simply do away with the AMT and thus spare middle class taxpayers, but that would increase the deficit, which Democrats who now control Congress have promised they would not do.
Unlike the law to fund water projects, the bill to fix the AMT is unlikely to pass in the Senate, much less survive a threatened Bush veto, because in this case Republicans will close ranks in opposition.
Yet, taken together, the veto override and passage of the AMT bill in the House are significant. The veto override shatters the myth of Bush's invincibility in every showdown with Congress, and monolithic Republican unity in the face of legislation pushed by the Democrats. The AMT bill suggests the possibility of a future reversal of the direction of economic redistribution such that it no longer benefits the extremely privileged at the expense of all others but the other way around.
Yet, even if there is a clear Democratic victory in 2008 in the race for the White House and the control of Congress, it will take a long time and all of the political will and activism of progressives in and out of the Democratic Party to reverse the damage done by Bush's class war. Many of the Democrats are nearly as beholden and solicitous to moneyed interests as the Republicans. And the only way to persuade them to do the right thing is to make it as costly and painful as possible to do otherwise.
majcastro@gmail.com |
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