Several ultra conservative house Republicans have said, in so many words, that phone calls from their major financial backers threatened to withdraw all future funding if they voted for the Boehner Plan B. You may recall that the speaker intended to bring his own fiscal cliff plan to a vote in the house as a way to put pressure on the administration. His Plan B would never had made to the floor of the senate, but it didn’t get even that far. He had to withdraw his own bill because he was forty or fifty votes short in his own party. Which brings me back to the ultra conservatives.
What they all but admit is that their votes have been bought and paid for by a small cadre of very wealthy persons who have no intention of allowing any tax rate increase in any form that might affect them. Moreover, they are equally intent on driving American public policy as far toward laissez-faire as they can, and damn the consequences to the deadbeat leeches in the 47%, and their near cousins, the malleable little people who think they are middle class.
In my mind, it’s an incredibly blatant form of bribery. What continues to astound me is how many people, whom their policies would economically and socially tear to pieces, can be relied on as true believers with unquestioning faith that Obama really is a socialist, and that a Teaparty style political agenda would be good for the country. Thank goodness our republic is robust, and is unlikely to fall, for very long, under the spell of a bunch of right wing Mussolini like billionaires and their erstwhile but gullible followers.