Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), the first Republican to publicly call on House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to allow a separate vote on a bill extending the Bush tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans, predicted on Sunday that such a measure could pass in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Cole’s admission come as Republicans are pressuring leadership to back off its opposition to increasing marginal tax rates on individuals making more than $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000 a year.

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Cole said, “Yeah, honestly I think if it got to the floor, it would carry”:

“I think it would,” said Cole, a deputy majority whip. “Look, that’s my judgment, but I spend a lot of time counting votes and looking around. But this doesn’t say we’re going to raise taxes on anybody, it says OK this group for sure, your taxes aren’t going up. Get that done with, get it over with.”

A growing number of lawmakers are advising Boehner and GOP leadership to allow a vote on the measure as part of a package to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Politico on Saturday that the GOP should vote “present” on such a bill — one version of which has already advanced in the Senate — and on Sunday Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) predicted that if the measure passed, Republicans could regain leverage and demand steep cuts to entitlements. Last month, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the Republican Conference Chairman, said that while he wouldn’t personally support a measure that raises taxes, “there may be enough Republicans who would vote for something like that.”

Despite their rhetorical support, however, Republican members have yet to sign the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) that would force the House to vote on the middle-income tax cut extension.

On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell confronted Newt Gingrich for falsely predicting in 1993 that the economy would suffer if then-President Bill Clinton raised marginal tax rates.

Republican are making a similar argument against President Obama’s call to raise marginal tax rates on the richest Americans, even though the economy and jobs grew exponentially during the Clinton years when the top marginal tax rate was at 39.6 percent for the top income earners.

O’Donnell read off Gingrich’s false prediction and asked him to apologize to Americans:

O’DONNELL: Who said this? ‘The tax increase will kill jobs and lead to a recession, and the recession will force people out of work and onto unemployment, and actually increase the deficit.’ That’s Newt Gingrich, in 1993, on the Clinton tax increase, and those of us who were working on the other side of that tax increase, Newt, have been waiting for your apology for 20 years for being completely wrong about that.

GINGRICH: I don’t agree with you.

O’DONNELL: But the economy soared. No one lost a job because of that tax increase.

GINGRICH: Baloney.

O’DONNELL: There was no recession, you said there would be a recession. There was no recession.

GINGRICH: The fact is, if you look at all the indicators when I was elected Speaker, virtually all of the economic growth occurs after the Republicans take control. Virtually all of the increase in the stock market, in fact all of the increase in the stock market is after the Republicans take control.

O’DONNELL: You did not reduce the rates, Newt. You said the rates would cause a recession.

GINGRICH: When we balanced the budget, we balanced the budget with a tax cut, not a tax increase. Four consecutive balanced budget with a tax cut, not a tax increase.

O’DONNELL: A tiny tax cut compared to the biggest tax increase in history, which is what Bill Clinton did. You didn’t dismantle it.

Watch it:

Indeed, in 1993 when President Bill Clinton raised taxes on the top income earners, Gingrich and the Republicans argued that the hikes would result in economic decline and result in huge deficits. They were proven wrong. The country experienced the “longest period of economic growth in U.S. history, increased business investment, 23 million jobs added, and, of course, budget surpluses.” The same boom did not materialize after President George W. Bush enacted his tax cuts; the country experienced large deficits and the weakest job and income growth in the post-war era.

The Detroit Free-Press, which endorsed Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in his 2010 campaign and has generally supported him since, blasted his decision to ram through a union-busting “right-to-work” law in a lame-duck legislative session. At Snyder’s urging, the state House and Senate each passed versions of the law this week. The editorial board slammed his move as a “failure of leadership” and observed that his “about-face” amounted to a betrayal of Michigan’s voters.

The paper noted that while it “trusted Snyder’s judgment,” that trust “has now been betrayed.” It expressed disappointment on behalf of independents who thought Snyder more independent and visionary “than partisan apparatchiks like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker or Florida’s Rick Scott,” adding:

His insistence that the legislation was designed to promote the interests of unionized workers and “bring Michiganders together” was grotesquely disingenuous; even as he spoke, security personnel were locking down the capital in anticipation of protests by angry unionists.

Snyder’s ostensible rationale for embracing right-to-work legislation — it was, he insisted, a matter of preserving workers’ freedom of association — was equally dishonest.

The real motive of Michigan’s right-to-work champions, as former GOP legislator Bill Ballenger ruefully observed, is “pure greed” — the determination to emasculate, once and for all, the Democratic Party’s most reliable source of financial and organizational support.

While Snyder and the Republicans in the legislature claim “right-to-work” is good for the state’s economy, studies show such legislation can cost workers money. The Economic Policy Institute found that “right-to-work” laws cost all workers, union and otherwise, $1,500 a year in wages and that they make it harder for workers to obtain pensions and health coverage. “If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide,” David Madland and Karla Walter from the Center for American Progress wrote earlier this year.

Earlier this year, Snyder told a U.S. House committee, “Right-to-work is an issue that is a very divisive issue… we have many problems in Michigan that are much more pressing… I don’t believe it is appropriate in Michigan during 2012.”

But Thursday, Snyder announced he had changed his mind and, a day later, both chambers of the Republican-controlled legislature rammed through similar anti-union bills with little debate.

On Sunday, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) conceded that Democrats have won the debate on raising taxes on the richest Americans and said that he would likely vote to increase rates on the top 2 percent of Americans in order to shift the debate to cutting entitlement programs and improve the GOP’s leverage in the debate over how to avert the so-called fiscal cliff.

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Corker explained that if Republicans “give Obama a 2 percent increase,” the party can then hold the debt ceiling hostage in order to secure real cuts in spending:

CORKER: The Republicans know they have the debt ceiling, that is coming up around the corner, and, the leverage is going to shift, as soon as we get beyond this issue. The leverage is going to shift, to our side where hopefully we’ll do the same thing we did last time and that is if the president wants to raise the debt limit by $2 trillion we get $2 trillion in spending reduction and, hopefully, this time, it is mostly oriented towards entitlement and with no process. [...]

[Obama] has the upper hand on taxes and you have to pass something to keep it from happening. We only have one body. If we were to pass, for instance, raising the top 2 rates, and that’s it, all of a sudden we do have the leverage of the debt ceiling and we haven’t given that up so the only way the debt ceiling.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has indicated that the GOP plans to use that leverage by demanding more spending cuts, but the move will result in great economic costs. In 2011, Republican demands nearly led to a credit default and ultimately cost taxpayers “$18.9 billion over 10 years, due to elevated interest rates between January and August 2011.”

Obama slammed the GOP’s strategy during a meeting with business leaders last week. “The thinking is the Republicans will have more leverage because there will be another vote on the debt ceiling, and we will try to extract more concessions with a stronger hand on the debt ceiling,” Obama told members of the Business Roundtable. “That is a bad strategy for America, it’s a bad strategy for your businesses, and it is not a game that I will play.”