I am not sure that I am sharing the same universe with Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times. She says that Speaker Boehner has never enjoyed stronger or more unified support from his caucus than he has now. How can that be? At some point, John Boehner is going to ask his caucus to vote for something they have almost all pledged not to vote for. Either that, or Boehner can’t get his caucus to cooperate and he has to tell the president that he can’t deliver his strongly supportive and unified caucus for any deal. Or, his caucus splits, with the majority voting against their Speaker and his deal. Or maybe they all vote “present” because they are a bunch of children.
The backbenchers may be keeping their criticisms quiet, but that doesn’t mean that are about to line up to vote for a tax increase on the top 2% of earners that is accompanied by few benefit cuts for Medicare and none for Social Security. Furthermore, the president is insisting that the debt ceiling be removed as a weapon. Perhaps the Republican Establishment wouldn’t mind having that gun put back in a locked case, but I’d like to see John Boehner sell that to his Tea Party caucus.
It is unclear to me why we should expect Boehner to successfully sell a deal for anything remotely similar to what the president is offering. And if he can’t sell it, he doesn’t have the strong support of his caucus. The fact that he just threw four members off key financial committees is also a sign that maybe things are not quite that harmonious inside the House GOP.
If Boehner can pull off an orderly retreat here, I will be shocked. I don’t think he is often sober past mid-afternoon. I don’t think he is good at his job. And I don’t think his caucus is reconciled to breaking their Norquist pledge and giving up on using the debt ceiling as leverage and basically doing the president’s bidding.
But, we’ll see, won’t we?
