This is interesting:

"We need to leave things as is [for] at least two years," said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), told TPM this afternoon. He shares that view with numerous GOP colleagues, conservative and moderate, who are walking a middle path between Democratic leaders, who want to let the upper-bracket tax cuts expire, and the GOP top brass, who wants to extend all of Bush's tax cuts permanently. "I hope we could agree to a two-year extension of the current law," Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told reporters today. Her Maine colleague Olympia Snowe said much the same.

Now that Republicans are going on record as favoring a temporary two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it's fair to say that there is a growing bipartisan consensus that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy should not be permanent.

The strange thing here is that Republicans are also proposing that Obama's middle-class tax cut expire after two years. That means while Democrats are pushing for a permanent extension of middle-class tax relief, Republicans only want to offer two years of it.

That's a pretty hard position for Republicans to defend. Obviously, their goal is to link Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy with Obama's tax cuts for the middle-class, hoping that the unpopular Bush tax cuts will get a free ride with the passage of the popular Obama tax cuts. But if it came to a vote, it's hard to imagine that they would oppose putting the Obama tax cuts in place permanently.

Basically their own actions, Republicans are taking a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy off the table altogether -- and they are doing it before even sitting down to negotiate with Democrats. If that isn't a sign that Democrats have all the leverage in this debate, I don't know what is.