As I predicted, Speaker Boehner has to go crawling to Steny Hoyer for votes. Meanwhile, Boehner is sneaking in and out of the White House begging for some way out of the trap he set for himself. As one of the commenters at The Hill said, “To the Republican House…If you need Steny and Nancys votes..we do not want that stinking deal.” Which is true. They don’t want that deal, but that’s the only deal available because too many Republicans are irresponsible lunatics who believe their own bullshit and make promises they can’t possibly keep. Meanwhile, Eric Cantor tries to walk back his absolutist stance on tax loopholes by trying to make them conditional on offsetting tax cuts elsewhere. In other words, he’ll consent to eliminating some tax subsidies if it doesn’t raise us any money. Isn’t that brilliant?
Then there’s Kent Conrad’s budget proposal, which has no chance of passing the Senate but might become a symbolic vote to let people know where these politicians stand. It has a 50-50 split of cuts and tax hikes, it doesn’t touch Social Security, and it trims about $30 billion from Medicaid over the next decade. I don’t know much more about it than that.
I think it’s finally occurring to the Republicans that they’ve run out of time to win any major concessions because there isn’t any time to write the legislation, and they’re begging for an short extension. They’re not going to rewrite the U.S. tax code in the next two weeks.
It sucks to be in the Republican leadership.
