Could the GOP Have Gotten a Better Deal?

There are those, such as Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt, who are as unhappy on the right as the lefties are about the tax deal struck between the GOP and Obama.  Here's what Hewitt had to say:

I will spend a lot of time on the program today discussing "the deal," but as Rush pointed out on his show this past hour, the GOP could have gotten so much more. President Obama would never have allowed taxes to go up on the middle class. Never.

What the D.C. GOP failed to grasp and what is now the source of anger among its supporters beyond the terms themselves is that for the past two years the D.C. GOP has been complaining bitterly and appropriately about being excluded from the process of governing. No sooner does the D.C. GOP get welcomed into the governing councils of the Beltway but they in turn exclude the people who sent them there, and not just the scores of newly elected representatives and senators who were not consulted on this "deal," but the millions of people who worked and contributed to the victory of November 2.

All it would have taken was a a request for input on various terms from the Republican negotiators to the new members of Congress and an invitation to the public to weigh in. But the old guard took it upon themselves to decide for the rest of the country what should be in the deal, and in so doing reverted to the form that brought about the Gang of 14 and immigration fiasco.

If the GOP intends to wield their new power the way that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did over the past two years, they will be shocked at how quickly the public deserts them. Springing this deal on their new colleagues and their supporters without any opportunity to comment on it is the GOP version of refusing to attend townhall meetings. Simply astonishing.

You can read Rush's thoughts here.

I think perhaps Rush and Hugh are both forgetting one important thing - we don't have the majority until January, and given the general petulance of Obama as exhibited in his presser yesterday, I don't think he'd really mind passing a huge tax hike to the voters. Pushing him too hard might have resulted in just that. The devastation to the economy would have been dramatic, and would the GOP really rather see that than accept a deal that has something for both sides to like?

The new members of the next Congress will have important work to do, but they're not in power yet. I don't think it was all that inappropriate for the existing Congress to make the deal - they're still empowered to do that until the new bunch is sworn in.

And we should never underestimate Obama's immaturity when it comes to governing any more than we should overestimate our actual power.