The real scandal at the IRS -- March 27, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

If you’re struggling with your taxes, this won’t come as a surprise:  The IRS is a mess.

I’m not referring to the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status. Congressional Republicans won’t let it go, but the scandal is just one of the agency’s problems.

Our tax system is built on trust, and we all have a stake in a fair, helpful, functioning IRS. Nobody loves paying taxes, but about 98 percent of the money the IRS collects comes in on time and voluntarily. Only 2 percent is from “enforcement actions.”

For the system to keep working, though, taxpayers must be able to rely on the IRS to be impartial and to answer questions and provide sound advice.  Impartiality came into question with reports last year that the IRS subjected tea party and other conservative groups to extra scrutiny. The agency has a new commissioner and new rules and is working to repair its image.

For all the attention the scandal has gotten on Capitol Hill – 15 hearings and counting – you’d think every American wants to start a 501(c)(4) organization. Most Americans just want to file their taxes correctly.

Once upon a time, people could walk into an IRS office, sit down and get help filling out their returns. 

Today, most people have to pay a professional or buy software. Americans spent 6.1 billion hours and $168 billion on tax preparation in 2012.

As if that weren’t enough, taxpayers must guard against getting fleeced by unscrupulous and incompetent preparers, identity thieves posing on the phone and in emails as the IRS, and other scams.

Every year more than 100 million taxpayers call the IRS for help and millions more write or visit IRS walk-in-sites. This year, though, IRS projects it will be able to answer only six in 10 of the calls it receives. A decade ago, it answered nearly nine in 10, according to the latest annual report to Congress by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson.

Olson is an independent voice for taxpayers in the IRS.  Her 2013 report, released in January, warns that IRS taxpayer service has dropped to unacceptable levels and could hurt voluntary compliance.  

For example, taxpayers lucky enough to get through by phone stay on hold for almost 20 minutes before they speak to a human.  

IRS now answers only “basic” tax law questions and won’t answer any questions after the April 15^th deadline, even from taxpayers who get filing extensions and complete their returns later in the year.

“It is a sad state of affairs when the government writes tax laws as complex as ours – and then is unable to answer any questions beyond ‘basic’ ones from baffled citizens who are doing their best to comply,” Olson wrote. 

How did we get into this fix? Ask Congress .

Congress has cut the IRS budget and staff 8 percent since fiscal year 2010 as the IRS workload has increased. The workload will get heavier as the IRS takes responsibility for the Affordable Care Act’s tax penalty for people who don’t buy health insurance. 

Training at the IRS has taken a hit from $172 million to $22 million since 2010, the report says. Is it a surprise, then, that customer service reps give incorrect or no answers?

Congress has also placed many demands on the IRS during its investigations of the tax-exempt organizations scandal. Over the last 15 months, 250 IRS staffers have spent 100,000 hours to responding to congressional requests and have produced more than a million pages of redacted documents, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Wednesday at a hearing.

All this comes at a cost-- $8 million to comply with congressional requests and another $6 million to $8 million to upgrade information technology to be responsive, he said. The meter is still running.

Taxpayers need to know that the IRS isn’t targeting people for their political, religious or other views.  They also need to know that they can get timely, credible information from the IRS. Everybody talks about reforming the tax code. Let’s start with making tax time a little easier for the hard-working taxpayer. 

 © 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Living with Clinton, Bush fatigue -- March 20, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The Ready for Hillary super PAC has raised $4 million to encourage Hillary Clinton to get in the 2016 presidential race.

Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that helped elect Barack Obama, has also thrown its considerable muscle behind Clinton’s expected candidacy. It plans to raise and spend far more than the $67 million it dropped on attack ads against Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign.

Clinton probably won’t announce her plans until the end of the year, but you don’t have to wait to buy Hillary gear -- a Ready for Hillary mug goes for $20.16 – or to glimpse what’s likely ahead. We already know.    

“Is Hillary Clinton too old to run?” the headline teased on a column by Charlie Cook in National Journal last month. Cook is the publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report and a respected campaign and elections analyst. He wrote:   

“Clinton turns 67 this October. At that age, she will likely be making her candidacy decision, and if nominated Clinton would turn 69 two weeks before the 2016 general election, notably the same age Ronald Reagan was when he was first elected in 1980. The choice to run for president is effectively a nine-year commitment: one year to run, another four years if she wins a first term – finishing up that term at age 73 – and then, assuming she runs for re-election and wins, serving four more years to end a second term at 77 years of age.”

Cook stirred a hornet’s nest. More than 4,200 comments flooded nationaljournal.com, and the vast majority were anti-Clinton, “among the most vitriolic that I have encountered in 28 years of column writing,” Cook wrote.

The Clintons are our Rorshach political couple. Americans adore and abhor them, see them as devils and divinity. Hillary Clinton’s fans saw the age question as sexist. Who asks if Vice President Joe Biden is too old to run? He’s five years older than Clinton. 

Many voters in 2016 will be too young to remember – and some weren’t yet born – when the Clintons occupied the White House. Others won’t remember much about Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. People who were just 10 years old when she ran last time will be voting in 2016. Having a fresh message and appeal is a challenge for boomer candidates. 

Some of Clinton’s friends reportedly are hoping she won’t run; they worry that the commitment is too much for someone in her late 60s.

Just reading about her possible nine-year commitment makes me tired – not for her but the rest of us.

Democratic and Republican partisans will man (and woman) the barricades again, of course, but my guess is that many of us have a nagging case of Clinton fatigue – and Bush fatigue. Does anybody really want nine more years of daily, hand-to-hand, political warfare such as we’ve endured since 1993?   

I’m with former first lady Barbara Bush. When she said last year that “we’ve had enough Bushes” in the White House, I cheered. She enlarged on that theme in January.

“If we can’t find more than two or three families to run for high office, that’s silly,” she said on C-SPAN. “And I think that the Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes – there are just more families than that.”

Even if Hillary Clinton does not run, another Clinton may yet appear on a national ballot, just as the Bushes have potential candidates of their own.

A couple of weeks ago, Barbara Bush told an interviewer on Fox & Friends that “maybe it’s OK” for two or three families to dominate American politics, as has happened before. Say it isn’t so.

Her son Jeb, 61, the former governor of Florida and the son and brother of presidents, is showing up more often at political events, raising his profile and buzz.

And if Jeb says no, the Bush dynasty doesn’t end there. George P. Bush, Jeb’s son and George W.’s nephew, just won the Republican primary for Texas Land Commissioner and is expected to win again in November. George P. Bush speaks Spanish fluently and should connect with Latinos, something few Republicans can claim. His mother was born in Mexico. He’s 37.

And speaking of dynasties, Chelsea Clinton must have inherited political genes. What’s in her future? She’s 34.

Like it or not, we just may have to live with Clinton and Bush fatigue.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Beware the hype about special election in Florida -- March 13, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

If you’ve ever looked at a leaf through a microscope, you know that tiny details appear enormous.

A special election is a rare moment in politics when the nation focuses its telescope on a single contest and then greatly magnifies the results.

Back in 1991, in a special Senate election, newly appointed Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania handily defeated Republican challenger Dick Thornburgh, and pundits read the tea leaves to say that health care had instantly jumped to the top of the national agenda.

Wofford did champion health care reform, as did Bill Clinton, elected president the next year. But we know how the Clinton health plan turned out.

In 1994, Wofford lost his Senate seat to a 36-year-old upstart named Rick Santorum. Health reform foundered for another decade.

When Democrat Kathy Hochul won a special House election in New York in an upset in 2011, analysts saw it as a sign Democrats would make fighting a Republican plan to cut Medicare their No.1 issue. By 2012, Hochul’s district had been redrawn, and Medicare was old news. She lost her seat. 

So perhaps it’s no surprise that when Republican David Jolly won Tuesday’s closely watched special House election in Florida, pundits saw it as a big deal. One political editor in the Sunshine State lifted his eyes from the microscope and said it was a “big, big, big, big win” for Republicans.

It was a win, certainly, but a narrow one.

The late C.W. Bill Young, a Republican, had held the seat more than 40 years. Jolly, who was Young’s former aide and general counsel, won by 3,400 votes out of 183,000 cast. It’s believed to be the costliest special election in history with about $12 million spent, most -- $9 million -- by outside groups.

Florida’s 13^th Congressional District in Pinellas County on the Gulf Coast was subject to a blizzard of negative ads. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, ran a TV spot blasting Democrat Alex Sink for her support of Obamacare, claiming that 300,000 Floridians will lose their current coverage and that the law will hurt seniors, families and others.

“With Alex Sink, the priority is Obamacare -- not us,” the narrator intones.

Republicans say the special election foreshadows GOP gains in congressional races this fall. Sink was “ultimately brought down because of her unwavering support for Obamacare and that should be a loud warning for other Democrats running coast to coast,” said Rep. Greg Walden, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Had Democrats won, they too would have played up the significance, claiming it portends victories in November and a strengthened Democratic hand in the Senate. Instead, they said it was unsurprising that the seat stayed Republican. Still, they couldn’t deny that the loss is disappointing and could affect morale.

But what neither party says is how few seats are actually in play in November. Most districts have been drawn to favor incumbents and avoid tight races, so even though all 435 House seats are up in the midterm election, about 370 are considered safely Republican or Democratic. The House is expected to remain in Republican control for Obama’s final two years.

In the Senate, Republicans need six seats to wrest control from Democrats. That’s where Republicans hope their relentless attacks on the president and his health care law pay off.  

For his part, with six months until the election, Obama is already warning Democrats about the consequences of complacency and staying home.  

“In the midterms, Democrats too often don’t vote,” the president said March 6 at a Democratic National Committee event in Boston. “Too often, when there’s not a presidential election we don’t think it’s sexy; we don’t think it’s interesting. People tune out. And…we get walloped. It’s happened before and it could happen again.”

It could. So much depends on what happens in the next six months that it’s wise, when you hear anyone  talking about the significance of the Republican victory in Florida, to remember the leaf under the microscope. 

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Move over, Mary Jane, there's a new bad girl in town -- March 6, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For Ronald Reagan’s first presidential inauguration in 1981, a candy company sent three-and-a-half tons of red, white and blue jelly beans to the White House.  

The candy was such a hit that Reagan jovially offered jelly beans to guests in the Oval Office and on Air Force One for the next eight years. First lady Nancy Reagan traveled the country warning young people to “just say no” to marijuana and other illegal substances.  

In those days, pot was the public enemy and sugar was just sweet. How quaint.

Today, the “evil weed” is seen increasingly as unthreatening, if not benign. Sugar is eyed as a gateway drug, blamed for everything from cavities and obesity to diabetes and heart disease.  

That sugar and marijuana have traded places in the public eye says a lot about how our culture and attitudes have changed. Nearly four in 10 Americans have tried marijuana, and more than half approve of legalizing it, polls show.  In 1969, the Woodstock year, only 12 percent approved, according to Gallup.

Twenty states allow medicinal use of marijuana, and voters in Colorado and Washington approved ballot measures in 2012 that legalize the use, cultivation and sales of marijuana to people 21 and over.

Other states don’t want to be left out of the blossoming pot economy. Oregon and Alaska are expected to put full legalization to the ballot test this November. Just the other day, the city council of the District of Columbia voted to decriminalize small amounts of pot.

Proponents see pot not only as an adult, personal choice, like alcohol, but also as an economic engine and boundless source of state tax revenue.  A TV ad that aired during the 2012 legalization campaign in Colorado showed a middle-aged mom who said she didn’t like pot but taxing it would mean money for schools and health care.  

In Denver, an enterprising Girl Scout troop set up its annual cookie sales table right outside a pot shop. And that leads us to sugar.    

If people are smiling on pot – at least for now – many have soured on sugar.

The World Health Organization says that our sugar intake should be no more than 5 percent of our total calories or about 6 teaspoons of sugar for women, 9 teaspoons for men.  A soft drink has up to 40 grams – about 10 teaspoons -- of sugar.

In England, chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies said last week that she believes “research will find sugar is addictive” and that “we may need to introduce a sugar tax.”

Several medical studies say sugar triggers the brain’s pleasure centers much the same way cocaine or heroin does. A study last year found Oreo cookies are as addictive as cocaine. Nobody wants to criminalize sugar, but many think more stringent labels and a tax on sugary soft drinks are good ideas.

First lady Michelle Obama last month unveiled proposed nutrition labels that will warn consumers how much added sugar is in their food. San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif., as well as Illinois are considering a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.

When former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to ban large sugary drinks, the courts slapped him down. Still, the publicity may have dampened New Yorkers’ thirst. Soda sales in New York declined nearly 7 percent over the 12 months ending last November.

The sugar and beverage industry groups insist that soft drinks are a small part of what Americans eat and drink. They say more research is needed and it’s unfair to blame sugar for America’s weight problem.   

Still, the potential tax revenue from sugar-sweetened  drinks is, well, intoxicating. The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University has a dandy calculator that shows how much each state could reap from a penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks. In Virginia, it’s $376.5 million a year. 

If we can legalize and tax marijuana, we should debate taxing sugary drinks. Oh, and pass the jelly beans. 

(C) 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Lock up the silver -- the labor unions are coming. Or not. -- Feb. 27, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley likes to say she wears high heels not as a fashion statement but to kick unions.  

 “Unions are trying to get in wherever they can…My job is to make sure I keep kicking them out,” Haley, a Republican, said the other day.

 “We discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water,” she told Rudolph Bell of the Greenville News in a video interview posted online.

Such anti-union stiletto swagger probably plays well on the campaign trail, and Haley is running for re-election this fall. But a governor who turns up her nose at good-paying jobs? Be careful what you wish for.

To hear some Southern Republican politicians, labor unions are the William Tecumseh Sherman of our time, aiming to lay waste to the South. Conservative activist Grover Norquist said as much during the battle over whether the United Auto Workers would represent Volkswagen workers at its plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The UAW vote was “step one” of a union march on the South, Norquist said.

“They get this (plant), then they start moving toward the other large companies…This is the gateway to the South, and by that I mean all the right-to-work, not heavily unionized, states,” he warned, according to a Reuters report.

Don’t head to the basement with the silver just yet. The VW workers voted 712-626 against union representation.

 In South Carolina, Haley says she would welcome more of those non-union BMW jobs. But “I discourage” factories with unions, she added. Her Democratic gubernatorial opponent, State Sen. Vincent Sheheen, sensibly said that “if Ford Motor Co. wanted to bring 10,000 jobs to South Carolina, we would welcome them with open arms.”

The organizing fight in Chattanooga took on epic proportions, with the Republican governor, state legislators and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker warning of dire consequences if the union prevailed. Corker, a Republican, said he had it on good authority that Volkswagen would add an SUV assembly line, if workers rejected the union.

The hand-to-hand combat was surprising because the company was not fighting the union. Volkswagen was officially neutral but tacitly supportive. It wanted – and still hopes -- to initiate a “works council” in Chattanooga, like those in its factories in Germany and other countries.

A works council brings together blue- and white-collar employees to make decisions about workplace issues, such as new equipment or scheduling, in a cooperative setting. The council system exists in all of VW’s plants except for Chattanooga and those in China. Under American labor law, though, workers need a union before there can be a works council.

It’s preposterous to think that Americans can’t distinguish between the bad old days of union-company warfare and a new, third way of collaborative management. After all, unions have been shrinking in size and clout for decades. Last year, only 11.3 percent of U.S. workers belonged to unions. In 1983, about 20 percent did.

North Carolina had the lowest level of union membership at 3 percent. Five percent of Virginia workers were union members. In South Carolina, 3.7 percent of workers belonged to unions; in Tennessee, 6.1 percent. Union representation is growing in Alabama, where 10.7 percent of workers were union members, but even that is under the national average. New York has the largest share of union members, 24.4 percent.

Southern states are among the 24 right-to-work states, where a worker cannot be forced to join a union because closed shops are banned. Even Michigan is now a right-to-work state; its law went into effect last March.   

After the vote in Chattanooga, the head of Volkswagen’s top works council in Germany suggested that the company might think twice before locating again in the South.

“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again,” Bernd Osterloh told the German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

It would serve certain Southern politicians right.   

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Cool cats in D.C.? Yes, in a museum -- Feb. 20, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

“You can’t fake true cool,” Bob Dylan said in his Chrysler Super Bowl commercial as a photo of James Dean flashed on the screen.

Dylan, selling cars at 72, and Dean, the “Rebel Without a Cause” actor who died in 1955 at the age of 24, are among 100 certified cool Americans in a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.

The “American Cool” exhibit of mostly black-and-white portraits includes actors Lauren Bacall, Marlon Brando, Benicio Del Toro and Steve McQueen;  musicians Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Jay-Z and Bonnie Raitt; writers James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker; and athletes Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Jack Johnson and Michael Jordan. 

Not one president or elected official made the list, but if the Presidents Day throng of exhibit-goers was an indication, Washington is hungry for cool. It’s also possible, though, that the gray heads who were grooving to cool Marvin Gaye had given up on the long lines upstairs where, for one weekend, visitors could look at David Datuna’s “Portrait of America” through Google glass. There’s cool and then there’s new cool.  

I almost skipped the “American Cool” exhibit, thinking that once cool is enshrined in a museum it can’t be cool anymore. Plus, while I understand that museums need to attract visitors, I hate to see them pander.

The Newseum, for example, has been struggling financially for years despite thoughtful exhibits on such topics as Civil War journalism and JFK. Desperate last fall to recoup losses, it opened a major exhibit of 60 costumes, “hilarious props” and other paraphernalia from the 2004 movie “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” just before a movie sequel was released. Stay classy, Newseum? I think not.

But “American Cool,” through Sept. 7, manages to be entertaining and thought-provoking. The captivating images make us think about the elusive quality of cool. I watched as writer Joan Didion, leaning against the door of her Corvette Stingray in 1970, mesmerized three young women for several minutes.

Fred Astaire is there but not Ginger Rogers. The only entrepreneur is a young Steve Jobs, long-haired and bearded, riding a motorcycle, bareheaded.

My idea of cool runs more to George Catlin than George Carlin – but neither is in the exhibit.  

Fortunately for us, Catlin painted native Americans in the 1830s before their way of  life vanished forever. He gave up a successful business as a portrait painter in Philadelphia and headed west on several trips he paid for himself. Eighteen of his colorful portraits hang on a curved staircase in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art, which adjoins the portrait gallery.

It’s seems odd that Carlin, a comedian famous for his biting social commentary, didn’t make it, although Lenny Bruce did. Carlin won the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor just a few days before he died in 2008.  

And Twain may be the father of modern American literature but he’s absent too – not because he pre-dates cool, a concept born in the jazzy 1940s. Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass made it.

The exhibit is the product of five years’ work by two cultural historians with doctorates in American studies, Joel Dinerstein and Frank Goodyear III.

Dinerstein is director of the American Studies department at Tulane University, where he teaches a class in the history of cool. No, he tells students, he himself is not cool nor can he teach them how to be cool. Goodyear, a former photography curator at the portrait gallery, is co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine.

To make the cool list, someone had to have three elements of these four: originality of artistic vision and of signature style; cultural rebellion in a given historical moment; “iconicity” or high-profile recognition, and a recognized cultural legacy.

And they needed something else: a great photo. Carlin met the other criteria but no suitable photo could be found. He appears on an Alt-100 list of runners up, along with Tony Bennett, Clark Gable, Jerry Garcia, Jack London, Norman Mailer and Janis Joplin.

No worries. When you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be in a museum.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Now's time to repair debt ceiling for future -- Feb. 12, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER  

“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining,” President Kennedy said in his 1962 State of the Union Address.

The sun is shining, and now’s the time to fix the debt ceiling for the future.  

Led by Speaker John Boehner, the House stepped back from the brink Tuesday and approved extending the federal government’s borrowing authority until March 15, 2015, no strings attached. The Senate followed Wednesday.  

Congress does its job -- hip, hip, hurray!

It’s a sign of our low expectations of Washington that the absence of a last-minute game of chicken was considered a great achievement.  

The country will not suffer a self-inflicted fiscal black eye. Yes! The government will honor its debts, federal parks will stay open and our economy won’t go into a tailspin. We’re No. 1!

There will be peace in the valley again. Ha. Let’s not go overboard. Forget peace in the valley or on the Hill.   

Boehner tried for two weeks to squeeze concessions from the White House in return for Republican votes to lift the debt ceiling. A change in the Affordable Care Act? No.  Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline? No. Restoration of cost-of-living increases to military pensions? No. 

President Barack Obama wouldn’t budge from a “clean” bill.

Boehner told his House Republican colleagues at a private breakfast Tuesday that the measure would include no special conditions. The goal was practical: Congress would do its job and avoid an election-year repeat of last fall’s high drama showdown and shutdown.

Last October, Republicans hoping to kill the health law forced a 16-day federal government shutdown that did nothing to dislodge Obamacare but took a $24 billion bite out of the economy, as estimated by Standard & Poor. Americans mostly blamed Republicans, although Democrats’ approval ratings slid as well.  

“We’re not going to make ourselves the story,” Boehner said at the breakfast, The Washington Post reported. The room was hushed as he returned to his seat.

“I’m getting this monkey off your back, and you’re not going to even clap?” the Ohio Republican asked in mock scorn. Such is party unity among the GOP.

Boehner has long had problems bringing his conference together at all, much less mustering the 218 votes that constitute a House majority.

“When you don’t have 218 votes, you have nothing,” he told reporters.

The debt limit measure passed 221 to 201 in the House, with 199 Republicans voting no. Boehner and 27 of his fellow Republicans voted for it. Most of the GOP yes votes came from House leaders, such as Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, or members who are retiring, such as Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia. 

The White House didn’t gloat, but press secretary Jay Carney did suggest that Congress now get behind Obama’s push to hike the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and renew long-term jobless benefits. As if.

Congress and the White House should use the breathing room of the next year to work together to make the debt ceiling a non- issue, as it once was. Neither party should lose stature because it acts responsibly. Paying our bills should be a given, not a bargaining chip.

Some in Congress have introduced fixes to the recurring debit limit debacle. Rep. Mike Honda, a California Democrat, and Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Chuck Schumer of New York and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii have bills that would shift the role of Congress. Instead of approving increases in the debt ceiling, Congress would have to disapprove them.

A similar proposal by Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, became part of last fall’s deal that raised the debt ceiling until Feb. 7. Democrats want to make permanent the McConnell fix.

A few centrist Republicans say they’re interested in the idea, but it’s unlikely to gain traction this year as Democrats and Republicans score political points before the midterm elections.

Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, “When this is over, we will focus on our agenda and – if we win six seats in the Senate – what we will do different if we control all of Congress.”

Boehner was wrong about one thing.  Republicans did become the story. Washington news has become a running tally of winners and losers.    

“GOP’s debt ceiling surrender,” read headlines in Politico and other news outlets.

This time, though, the Republicans’ political retreat was a victory for the country. Boehner deserves a hand. 

And as the sun shines, Democrats and Republicans should join in fixing the debt ceiling for the future.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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