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Mark saves Bill of Rights, estate tax Sunday, Jul 2, 2006 By John Brummett Liberals in Arkansas, meeting in a corner booth at a diner in the fall of 2002, lamented their fate. They agreed to hold their noses and vote for Mark Pryor for the U.S. Senate although he acted nearly like a Republican, praying in public like that and firing his gun and all. But he was David's boy, and, goodness knew, Tim Hutchinson was worse. It's funny how things turn out sometimes. Four years later, Mark single-handedly saved the U.S. Constitution and its precious Bill of Rights from right-wing trivializing. A roll call to refer to the states a ban on physical flag desecration, the first-ever exception to free expression, required a two-thirds majority and fell a single vote short. That would be Mark's. He said he simply had an aversion to amending our Constitution save the most compelling need, which this politically motivated solution to a nonexistent problem wasn't. The Republicans had ordered the vote solely to extract unpopular positions from brave Democrats. Mark put himself among the brave and the free, knowing he'll be viciously cast as unpatriotic come election season 2008. Then Pryor played an almost equally pivotal role in keeping the estate tax from being repealed outright by Republicans wanting to spare the nation's richest 1 percent any taxes at all on the lottery winnings their daddies and mommies bequeath them. Senate Republicans forced a procedural vote to bring outright repeal to the table, at which time it would have passed by a simple majority. The procedural move required 60 votes, though. It got 57. Thus Mark did not singularly save the estate tax. He merely joined up on that one with Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy. And that was just one week's work. And he wasn't finished. At week's end, Pryor was back in that essential role he played last year on judicial nominations and whether to filibuster them. He was trying to leverage a centrist, pragmatic compromise, meaning an actual policy solution amid a purely partisan atmosphere. This time it was on the estate tax, which he wants to reduce, not eliminate. His mission was to spare the descendants of farmers and small businessmen onerous taxes on inheritances without committing the fiscal irresponsibility of outright repeal. That's because outright repeal would carve a trillion dollars over 10 years out of a federal budget already in a hole that gets $300 billion deeper every year. The state's Republican statewide newspaper blasted Pryor for lying. But he hadn't lied. He'd said all along that he wanted to spare farmers and small businessmen from the estate tax. He never said he wanted to do away with any estate tax at all. Currently the estate tax kicks in at $2 million, but with further exceptions if at least half the estate is a farm. It touches about 1 percent of estates. When outright repeal failed, Republicans cooked up a proposal to raise the exemption to $10 million, which would touch about only 0.15 percent. That's about one-seventh of one estate out of a hundred estates. Then the Republicans threw in timber tax breaks - that's from your money, by the way - to try to bribe three balking Democratic senators from timber-producing states. Those would be the two from Washington and, you guessed it, Our Boy Mark. But all three were admirably continuing to balk, and Pryor was taking the lead in shopping a solution falling between $2 million and $10 million. He's on the right track. A $2 million estate isn't what it used to be, and will become less of what it used to be with each passing inflationary year. At this writing, Pryor was fending off Republican sops, cajoling centrists of both parties and getting his proposal scored - meaning the cost to the treasury calculated - by congressional budget experts. He was behaving precisely as a senator ought to behave, with brave devotion to conscience and diligent service to reason. And here's betting he'll survive the sizzling rhetorical heat in '08. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
