you re shaking your head, but who on this stage would walk away from that deal? will you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes you d walk away on the ten to one deal. so, jonathan, a stirring round of applause from core republican constituencies for never paying for the baby boomers retirement. what do you make of all this? this was the on thing that unifies the republican party. so they are digging themselves and the country into a deeper and deeper hole. what they re basically saying by raising their hands like that is, we don t give a rat s patootie about the deficit. we don t give a damn about future generations about putting things on the credit card. all we care is that people making over, i don t know, $10 million, $100 million not pay a single dime more in taxes and that that belief trumps everything else in american politics. that is the definition of
supreme court and the pow ter has, it could go with the lauer court s ruling in saying parts of unconstitutional. parts of constitutional, but still, until the supreme court makes the ultimate decision about what this health care law is, we re going to still go through this yo-yo effect with the other lower court rulings. jonathan alter, briefly, does that mean we re going to be keyed up for a 2012 campaign year situation where anthony kennedy on the supreme court will decide this and all even more explosive? i think so. he is the swing vote. the question here is whether the country wants to go back to a pre-1935 view of the american social contract. the supreme court in the early new deal using the commerce clause, the same part of the constitution invoked in this decision said, no, all that new deal stuff, that s all unconstitutional, and then the supreme court changed and ruled that, no, it wasn t
i mean, what i say about mitt romney he dodged a lot of bullets. i was surprised the others didn t attack him more aggressively. because he s not competing in the game s straw poll. you saw pawlenty and bachmann really going at each other. i have to say, i think the real win eer of last night s debate was rick perry. to me, he is going to come in and has much more charisma thanny any of the people onstage last night and i don t think he s going to let mitt romney off the hook the way the other contender, so far. we re going to spend a lot of time on rick perly in a minute. jonathan alter, i want to key up for you one of the most staggering and depressing sound bites, which had to do with the ratio of spending cuts to tax increases that republicans would accept. give a listen to this and then i want your reaction to it. say you had a deal, a real spendings cut deal, ten to one as byron said. spending cuts to tax increases.
what wasn t. now, i ve really faulted president obama s leadership on this issue. remember, back in december had they cut that deal to extend the bush tax cuts, they could have gotten the debt ceiling should have insisted the dell ceiling be extended at the same time. you hear a lot of white house folks saying, oh, the situation wasn t right there. no one would have gone for it then. seems to me a terrible failure of advance thinking and negotiation that meant this whole showdown and fiasco could have been avoided altogether. do you fault the white house leadership on this? i agree with you. in fact, the president was asked at the time why he didn t try to put this in a deal. he said, well, the republicans are going to be reasonable, not try to blackmail, hold up the country. i think by now the president and others ought to realize what kind of hostage-takers and radicals we re dealing with in this modern republican party. had you had the republican party 30 years ago they wouldn