As we embark on a week of shutdown/debt ceiling negotiations, it is helpful to read Paul Kane’s roadmap in the Washington Post. He has Harry Reid passing the Senate’s version of the Continuing Resolution around dinner time on Sunday the 29th, barely more than 24 hours before the government runs out of money. This might seem like a strategic choice to put the screws to the House Republicans, but it’s mainly driven by the rules of the Senate. About the only thing the Senate Republicans could do to give their House colleagues more time is to wave the 30-hour post-cloture debate on the motion to proceed to the bill. If they did that, Reid could potentially hold the vote on final passage as soon as Friday. But he could still wait until the last moment if that is what he wanted to do.
Another piece in the Post, by Ed O’Keefe, looks at the key congressional players whose actions will determine how this unfolds. What stands out is the lack of certainty that John Boehner can win a majority from his own caucus for any course of action.
Mr. Kane reports that Boehner may try to deal with the debt ceiling part of the problem with a vote on Friday:
The House could pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling. An initial draft of the legislation contains something for everyone in the Republican Conference: It increases the debt limit until the end of 2014, delays Obamacare for a year and includes a grab bag of conservative goals, such as offshore drilling, Medicare means testing, a tax code overhaul and approval of the Keystone pipeline. The bill is designed to gain the necessary bare majority with GOP votes alone. But there’s no guarantee of that, because a significant number of House Republicans don’t believe in raising the debt limit under any circumstances.
I think the idea here is that, if the House passes an ObamaCare delay as part of a debt ceiling extension on Friday, they will be more amenable to passing a “clean” continuing resolution on Monday. Boehner will argue to his caucus that he needs their support or he will be forced to ask Nancy Pelosi for help, and Pelosi may have some demands that the Republicans will not like.
Pelosi suggested Sunday that she’d like to once again be House speaker and she knows that Boehner may once again need her and Democrats to help him quickly pass legislation that most Republicans don’t like. Before she agrees to do so, she may force the speaker to give Democrats something they want. What that is remains to be seen.
Boehner wants to avoid having to make a deal with Pelosi, but that doesn’t mean that he will succeed in convincing enough Republicans to agree to his strategy. If he fails to pass a debt ceiling extension on Friday, he will face the choice of passing the Senate’s bill with whatever conditions Pelosi demands, or just letting the government shut down.
That sounds pretty bleak, but it’s actually worse than that because even if he succeeds in extending the debt ceiling on Friday, and he gets his caucus to pass a clean CR without Democratic help on Monday, the Senate will never agree to the conditions he’s putting in the debt ceiling bill. By putting “offshore drilling, Medicare means testing, a tax code overhaul and approval of the Keystone pipeline” into the debt ceiling bill, he will assure that it goes nowhere.
And, because his strategy depends heavily on the idea that he can use the leverage from the administration’s fear of a default to get a win on ObamaCare, it actually does matter that he has no prayer of extracting all these concessions from either the Senate or the president. The more the House Republicans understand this, the less likely they are to go along with his strategy. And even if they do go along with his strategy, he is still going to have to find a way to raise the debt ceiling in a way that the Democrats can support. It seems that, one way or the other, Boehner is eventually going to have to go hat in hand to Pelosi.
And that will raise interesting questions about Boehner’s ongoing viability as Speaker of the House. We don’t have a parliamentary system but, if we did, Boehner going to Pelosi would be the equivalent of a reshuffling of the majority coalition. In order to survive, Boehner might need Democratic votes, which would make him the head not of the Republican Party in the House, but of an ad hoc bipartisan coalition. Would he be willing to do that and govern like that?
Brian Beutler is really coming into his own. I’m excited about his career.
A tremendous story that everyone should share with their friends and family.
Great essay — thanks for pointing it out.
Sounds like Boehner is reviving his earlier plan to pass a clean CR by promising a big fight on the debt limit (where he probably expects business pressure on Republicans will allow him to back down later). He obviously wants to remain Speaker as long as possible, which means a) not pissing off the majority of House Republicans, which will make him lose the next Speaker vote and b) not causing a major catastrophe, which will cost the Republicans the House majority. He’s trying to thread the needle, but unfortunately for just about everybody he has to do it with a pretty big rope.
Reid giving him little time may actually help because, especially with a possible alternate way to force through their deluded goals still available, the more conservative Republicans will be afraid to push the country over the cliff of a shutdown.
I said this before, but a centrist governing coalition is impossible, basically because any Republican who goes along with it is going to lose his seat. Boehner can pass the occasional bill via deals with Pelosi, but he can’t run the House via a deal with Pelosi.
“ongoing viability as Speaker of the House..”
The theoretical possibility of Pelosi’s Dems and some “sane” Repubs combining to come to the rescue of rationality is often bandied about. I have to say it seems about as likely as space aliens landing in NYC or Yahweh taking command of the world’s boob tubes for a little message.
Barney Frank’s witticism applies here: House members are of two types, they are either Michelle Bachmann or afraid that Michelle Bachmann will run in a primary against them. The Drunken Boner would be dead if he ever pulled this stunt of granting de facto Dem control, and even if he has had enough of his pathetic life in the asylum, I bet most of these supposed Repub coalition members haven’t. The needs of the country are never going to trump the needs of anyone’s political career.
Given the innumerable restraints, blockages, and choke points of our 18th Century constitution, what is now in question is the “ongoing viability” of our form of “government”. As anyone can see, it obviously cannot hope to function once one of the two major parties has reshaped itself into an extremist party of American Nazism. Its only hope of functioning was via half-loaf compromise solutions, and one party now only recruits and elects those who refuse to participate in the slightest demonstration of “compromise”.
The idea that we can return the (intentionally destroyed) federal budget to solvency (let alone ever pay down the current mountain of debt) solely through cuts to domestic non-military spending, with no new revenue sources, is imbecilic. Yet that is the Prime Directive of the “conservative” movement, which cannot be defeated or tossed on the garbage heap due to its successful nationwide election rigging and its successful poisoning of the minds of entire regions and demographics.
Re. your conclusion, euzoius, the “successful poisoning of the minds of entire regions and demographics” has made governing exceedingly difficult right now.
There is a silver lining to this, though: by tossing fully into this divisive strategy, the GOP is creating vast majorities of younger voters and immigrants who are and will be overwhelmingly opposed to their candidates and their philosophy. We’ve been living with a horrible political atmosphere for years, but demographics will deliver us to a better future, since the Republicans have convinced themselves that they can and must continue their racist, sexist and xenophobic rhetoric and policy positions. They won’t be able to election rig their way into Executive and Legislative control for very much longer. I am worried that these Republicans will damage the nation in the meantime, though.
It’s also worth noting that every one of these Republican representatives who’s worried about getting primaried also has to win a general election to stay in office. And they aren’t all in safe seats. For instance, several Republicans in California have large Latino populations in their districts, and they’re getting pretty nervous about the failure to act on immigration reform. So there are breaking points.
What Stephen describes here has already happened in California, both at the Legislative and Congressional levels. The Democratic caucus gained Legislative supermajorities in 2012, and even 2010 was a good year for California Dems. These demographic waves will only get bigger, and they will eventually swamp much of the rest of the country at the State and Federal levels.
The Republican Party cannot remain relevant and keep their current governing philosophy.
Yes, thanks for these perspectives, cfdj and ss. I’m not going to assert there isn’t cause for hope and even some basis for it. But the Conservative Era is long, and feels like Waiting for Godot. Time is ticking away, and Dems have been talking about demographic change for a long time…
As for recent electoral successes in CA, congrats. It seems to me the “conservative” movement has decided to permanently retreat in CA–they are close to giving the state up. But isn’t CA a state that basically outlawed the Repub’s favored gerrymandering techniques? And of course, having finally defeated anti-democratic “conservatism” at the state level, CA citizens are actually not actively being blocked from voting.
Yes, in 2010 Californians voted to take redistricting out of the hands of the Legislature and place it in an independent Commission which generally worked as intended. The Proposition was actually placed on the ballot by a moderate Republican Senator; it was the price he extracted in exchange for, get this, his vote to approve the 2009 State budget. Now THAT’s legislating with integrity, huh?
On balance, the Districts made by this California Commission didn’t seem to favor either Party. What favored the Dems in the last two elections was a combination of demographic changes and the devastating results of a decade of budgets held hostage by a Republican Party which was able to control the budget despite their minority status, due to horrible legislative rules. Sound familiar?
Anyway, the citizens become sick of seeing their schools, roads and other services sink to the bottom. In 2012, not only did we create the Legislative supermajorities which allowed us to pass a budget on schedule for the first time in years, the people voted to tax ourselves in order to bring $7 billion in revenues to repair part of a large structural budget hole.
True, Californians have an easier path to the ballot box than other States. But in the end, this GOP strategy of denying the franchise to poor minorities, younger people and women will enrage future generations within those growing constituencies and cause them to reject Republicans. Before long, that will eventually be an electoral loser for them too. The injustice and pain will make us furious in the meantime, though.
Pelosi should demand Boehner publicly declare the Hastert Rule dead.
Among other requests.
Can the Frog Pond remind me of the procedures required for the House to change their Speaker in the middle of a Congressional session? Do we view it as likely that the Tea Party caucus can rip the gavel away from him?
I concede that, even if House procedures preserve Boehner’s ability to keep the Speakership, he may not want to govern with a bipartisan coalition and a caucus within his own party foaming at the mouth even more than they are now.
Which only reinforces the idea, discussed earlier, that the Senate add popular reform legislation the the bill. If Boehner will really end up having to go to Pelosi, give her some ante to bargain with.
For some reason Dems remain in thrall to fear of what the Gops will say if we ….. They’ll say it anyway. If the Dems get a clean bill through the Gops will yap on and on about “fiscal irresponsibility”. If Dems propose concessions and the bill fails, of course the Gops will accuse the Dems of sabotaging it. But if the Dems have any sense at all, Boehner and the gang will find it pretty hard to trumpet that the Dems forced the Reps to throw the economy to to dogs because they wanted to start giving the vets what they were promised, or give kids a chance at a real education, or help keep American cities and states from choking to death. All it would take is some smarts and some fighting instinct.
If the government shutting down means the less-Fascist party takes back the House in 2014…let it shut the fuck down.
Seriously.
Democrats helping Republicans not hang themselves is a shit idea.