Reid calls McConnell's bluff On Obama tax plan, GOP blocks up or down vote

Late yesterday, Harry Reid nearly blindsided his Republican counterpart by passing President Obama’s one-year tax extension of the Bush tax rates on the first $250,000 of income. He called for a majority vote on both that plan and a full extension of all the Bush tax cuts, confident that he would win on both. Mitch McConnell declined.

This ended some uncertainty about the tax vote, and whether Reid could round up the forces to pass the Obama plan. Initially, Reid planned to hold the vote sometime later in the month, defying earlier reports that claimed he was having trouble securing the votes. Then one high-profile Senator, Joe Lieberman, came out against the Obama tax plan, saying he didn’t want to do anything piecemeal. That appeared to imperil the prospect of getting 50 votes in the Senate for it, given the known perspectives of conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Ben Nelson, and other vulnerable Senators in tight re-election campaigns like Claire McCaskill and Jon Tester.