Filibuster!

Well, I guess it’s going on long enough we need to open a live blog thread!!!

Senator Bernie Sanders has started a filibuster of the Obama/McConnell behind-closed-doors tax deal.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — a self-described democratic socialist — railed against the plan in a lengthy floor speech that he said “you [can] call … a filibuster.”

“You can call what i am doing today whatever you want, you it [sic] call it a filibuster, you can call it a very long speech … ,” read a message posted on Sanders’s Twitter account after he’d taken to the rostrum at 10:24 a.m.

“I’m not here to set any great records or to make a spectacle,” Sanders said at the top of his speech. “I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”

CSPAN-2 is live streaming the Senate.

Right now, my Senator Mary Landrieu is up and appears to be aiding the effort.  She even has a nifty graph up about my state of Louisiana.

Sanders has called the plan  “virtually a Republican idea”.

Here are the CBO numbers on how much this tax plan will cost.  The number is $858 billion dollars.

The Obama-McConnell tax compromise will cost $858 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

In other words, the Republican-backed tax plan will cost more than the stimulus bill, which priced out at $787 billion.

For starters, extending all of the Bush tax cuts for two years will cost a total $675.2 billion over 10 years, according to a Dec. 3 Congressional Research Service study. Setting the estate tax at 35%, adding an exemption for estates under $5 million, knocking 2 percentage points off employees’ portion of the Social Security payroll tax, and the cost quickly goes up.

So, how does the U.S. pay the bill?

Twitter Update from CSPAN on the Live Coverage:

Screen grabs from C-SPAN2 HD coverage of Bernie Sanders filibuster http://cs.pn/gveC51 & http://cs.pn/dFZNBq

From Brian Beutler in TPM:

It’s a filibuster as filibusters were originally intended — and, as such, makes a mockery of what the filibuster’s become: a gimmick that allows a minority of senators to quietly impose supermajority requirements on any piece of legislation.

Joined at different times by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Sanders has been decrying the Obama tax cut plan for bailing out the wealthiest people in America. “How can I get by on one house?” Sanders railed, sarcastically. “I need five houses, ten houses. I need three jet planes to take me all over the world! Sorry, American people. We’ve got the money, we’ve got the power.”