The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, has an op-ed at Yahoo! News about the tax deal: "If I had my way taxes would not have gone up on anyone, but the unavoidable fact was this if we had sat back and done nothing taxes would have gone up dramatically on every single American, and I simply couldn't allow that to happen."
He also looks forward to the next stage:
now that the President has gotten his long-sought tax hike on the "rich," we can finally turn squarely toward the real problem, which is spending. Predictably, the President is already claiming that his tax hike on the "rich" isn't enough. I have news for him: the moment that he and virtually every elected Democrat in Washington signed off on the terms of the current arrangement, it was the last word on taxes. That debate is over. Now the conversation turns to cutting spending on the government programs that are the real source of the nation's fiscal imbalance.