Jonathan Weisman leads off with the Grey Lady’s coverage of the Tan Man.
After three years of cajoling, finessing and occasionally strong-arming his fitful conservative majority, Speaker John A. Boehner waved the white flag on Wednesday, surrendering to demands from his right flank that he tie money to keep the government open after Sept. 30 to stripping President Obama’s health care law of any financing.
There seems to be an uptick in “white-flag” analogies lately. House Republicans and their staff got quite testy with Sen. Ted Cruz last night, with one leadership aide telling CNN‘s Dana Bash that Cruz has less balls than Texas state legislator Wendy Davis. (Is that an endorsement of Sen. Davis’s gubernatorial campaign?)
If you are interested in the mechanics of how the House plans to proceed, Pete Kasperowicz did a good write-up in The Hill yesterday. It’s all about self-executing rules and other such eye-blurring details. Most of you are probably more interested in the internecine slap-fight going on between the House and Senate Republicans.
I guess that the House members thought that Ted Cruz would take their effort to defund ObamaCare and make it his cause in the Senate, and maybe he will. But his first reaction was to note, correctly, that Harry Reid has the votes in the Senate to restore the funding for ObamaCare. Maybe for the first time, Sen. Cruz is being criticized for telling the truth.
A lot of people have been trying to tell the Teahadist Brigade the truth about the ObamaCare defunding effort, including the Speaker of the House. But, so far, it has been to no avail. Back to Weisman:
With much of the government set to run out of money at the end of the month — and run out of borrowing authority by mid-October — Mr. Boehner faced a choice: he could steer a middle ground and find a way out of his fiscal dead end with Republican and Democratic votes, or he could yield to a conservative movement to strip the Affordable Care Act of financing, unite his Republican majority around that war cry, and hope for the best.
House conservatives let Mr. Boehner know that any solution that could not attract a majority of the Republican conference could cost him his speakership. Divided Senate Republicans made clear that linking further government spending or a debt ceiling increase to gutting the health care law would never get through the Senate.
And, so, they stumble forward, hoping for the best. The House will attempt to pass a rule that will self-execute amendments from conservative Republicans Tom Graves of Georgia (to defund ObamaCare) and Tom McClintock of California (to prioritize interest payments in the event of a government shutdown). Assuming that passes, they’ll have a vote on final passage and send it over to Harry Reid. He’ll file for cloture to limit debate and cut off any filibuster. Some Republican(s) will object and Reid will have to wait a couple of days for the cloture vote to “ripen.” Then they’ll override the filibuster and pass a clean Continuing Resolution.
At that point, Speaker Boehner will be back at square one, but hopefully with a more compelling argument that the world is not filled with people riding ponies on rainbows.
And I didn’t even talk about the debt ceiling!
And so a mighty nation of 300+ million souls get’s browbeaten by 50 rabid terrorists in congress. I guess this is a sickening perversion of that David vs. Goliath story.
And Chuck Todd tells us it is not the media’s job to correct lies.
Yep it’s been their job alright to coddle the GOP Taliban, and here we are today. Tragic
Also posted at Political Animal.
And so 10% of one branch of the government lurches the entire country from one manufactured crisis to another.
Maybe more like 25%.
Yes indeed, do something, anything to get the attention back to Cruz’s Crusaders in the senate and allow the irresponsible, childish “conservative” Id to be stroked. That the likely result is to ratchet the pressure on Boner’s Boneheads even higher in the future is irrelevant or beyond consideration.
Assuming the failure of a Cruz-led filibuster (and the senate seems not to want to appear as much of a total clown show as the House), the Boneheads will have “cave or shutdown” vote before them in late Sept, hopefully with only a couple days to spare. Hapless Harry should send the clean CR back to Boner on Sunday September 29th. Here’s that hot potato you wanted, boyz! Enjoy!
Repubs think these manufactured crises and displays of paralyzed gub’mint help them. They’re takin’ the hard votes to Tame the Beast! Conventional wisdom is that this brinksmanship is about the only way to have a chance of exorcising the demons of the Repub House come 2014. I say let the “conservative” Id rule and let braindead America see the implications of the Great Repub Gerrymander of 2010.
Absolutely nothing can be accomplished with crazed political nihilists in power, and no more members of the Repub base are going to change their deranged views. Those who still support Repubs and call themselves “conservatives” have as much chance of leaving the party over failure as the Nazis in Hitler’s Bunker in April 1945. Let “conservative” insanity come to fruition and see what the political result is. 48% of the nation has been trained to think a national train wreck is “necessary”.
It almost seems like this is the conclusion the Drunken Boner has reached. The bridge is out, Engineer John, and your passengers want you to pour on more coal—so stoke that engine and have another one, what the hell! It was so much easier when you were just the stumbling bagman, eh?