True Colors....Primary Colors

San Francisco Nan, alias Nancy Pelosi, unveiled her true, tax-levying colors today.

Yep. It's taken just four days for the new Speaker of the House of Representatives to give voice to plans for higher taxes. In the midst of a strong economy and rising governmental revenues, the Democrats want more income to spend on future elections, via transfer payments.

Thus, the plans to 'tax the rich.' It will be interesting to see what Charlie Rangel thinks of these plans. I'm sure the Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune.

Of course, as I wrote in my initial post, the Democrats do not hold a veto-proof majority in either house of Congress. So, look for the beginning of a string of vetoes by President Bush.

In the longer term, I think this has the potential to lead, ultimately, to my informal forecast of a 5-seat Republican majority in the House, come January, 2009. If Americans have begun to send a message to both parties to avoid extremism, and govern from the center, across the party aisles, then Pelosi's opening tax cannonade should spell a fairly rapid reversal of the already-thin Democratic control of the lower chamber, come next election cycle.

Personally, I think this is great. As I've written in comments on another blog, Speakers are a creature of the House, not the people. That is, they are elected by fellow politicians to the position. Their district merely sends them up to the House. Look on the list of modern Speakers- Rayburn, McCormack, Albert, O'Neill, Rostenkowski, Wright, Gingrich, Hastert. How many of them have seen their Speakership, or their party's majority, end due to some scandal, either their own, or another party member's? Pelosi is, merely on statistics, likely to be no different.

With this session-opening tax talk, she is helping to put her new position at risk from the get-go, on three bases. First, the traditional risk of presiding during someone's malfeasance, e.g., Jefferson's frozen cash troubles. Second, her own district's expectations of liberalism that is far outside the bounds of what most of the country, even its Democrats, will countenance. Third, damaging a robust economy with tax hikes, more wasteful spending, and regulation.

I'm looking forward to the next few months, as the rifts begin to from among the House Democrats. Or, perhaps more dangerously, they march lockstep in the direction of a return to the minority.