It does not appear that John Boehner can pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling with only Republican votes. But, if he can, he can only do so by attaching all sorts of nonsense to it that the Senate will laugh out of the room. What this means is that he will have to drop all his demands and go hat in hand to Nancy Pelosi, who can be magnanimous or not, depending on her mood.
This situation was predictable. It’s exactly what I said would happen a month ago. John Boehner is not going to allow a default on our debts. Regardless of what he said on Sunday, he’s been clear that he would not allow a default all year long. You can trust him on that.
Somehow I missed this important detail about Reid’s move yesterday:
I love it! First the Heritage Foundation’s ACA, now this. Dare Senate Republicans to filibuster a Republican bill, and if they don’t, dare House Republicans to reject a Republican bill.
Yes that seems very significant. Hope he is coordinating it with Pelosi, who will need to demand the same when Boehner comes weeping and begging for her votes.
Can’t you just see Boehner breaking down in her office? He puts his head in her lap and cries softly while Nancy is like “There, there, John, I’ll save you from tanking the global economy and becoming an international pariah. You won’t even have to be Speaker anymore, because next year I’ll be, again.”
I wish I had the same confidence you did in Boehner’s conscience. If he cuts a deal, it will be the end of his political career here in Ohio. His district is full to the brim with Tea Partiers. He would not be able to show his face here, ever again.
He would be the most hated man in Southwest Ohio.
We will see in a very short time.
Boehner is retiring anyway. He’ll never be reelected speaker, and he knows it.
That IMO is what makes him more dangerous now than earlier. Because he should be clear that his career is ended now, he is less likely to be accommodating and more likely to push everything over the edge. And more likely to lash himself to the Republican Party until the end.
The Republican leadership is going to spin this out until around October 21 to try to break Democratic unity in the House and Senate through the old “gang of trick”. Collins has already tried that gambit and been told No by the Dems. It will come back.
This is my biggest fear. Boehner has been a Republican all his life. I think his loyalties to his party and his lifetime political allies run deeper than we imagine. I envision him being “the good soldier”.
It would not surprise me to see neither Boehner or the GOP pulling back until we default and after the stock market drops about 2000 points. There is just too much of a kamikaze attitude which is completely out of control.
But I would love nothing better than to wake up some morning very soon and eat some crow for breakfast. And I hope I do.
What party? There is no GOP any more. You’d think Boehner, of all people, would know this.
Yes, it would more appropriately be called loyalty to his tribe.
Yes, but it’s complicated. Boehner’s tribe is not the Tea Party. Read this, by a close ally of Boehner, Congressman Steve LaTourette — and read between the lines.
Of course he “has” to blame Democrats, but it’s the other ones he’s blaming that I call your attention to. Because LaTourette is very loyal to Boehner, so I assume that Boehner is very loyal (or in your words, tribal) to LaTourette and Republicans like him.
http://www.republicanmainstreet.org/2013/09/latourette-in-the-washington-post-dont-blame-boehner/
i should have said “former congressman” — he retired in January of this year.
This is even more explicit:
http://wap.npr.org/news/Health/225986563?start=15
I don’t know, reality is approaching, fast.
That’s the market adding to the pressure and behaving as if this is a normal time, which it isn’t.
Because if the debt ceiling occurs, there won’t be any T-bills issued at any rate until the debt comes down below the debt ceiling–unless the Treasury does one of the many postulated work-arounds. And T-bills coming due will be first in line to be paid. Depend on it. T-bills coming due will be paid before Social Security checks go out; both parties consider the elderly junior creditors.
Now the folks who trade T-bills on the basis of that analysis will likely lose. The herd is at work here. A government default is not like a corporate default.
Besides, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have constructed stories in which this does not happen and what happens is more economic stability and unicorns.
Whatever reality is going to be the last week in October, it’s not just going to be high yields on existing US government bonds.
Republicans are like the Dark Knight.
Stop your whining, Americans. You’ll see. This whole credit limit thing will only be a flesh wound!!!
“Reality”…BooMan, reality to the Tea Party Republicans is that this T-bill situation and everything bad that happens in this world is Obama’s fault. That’s THEIR reality.
As far as Boehner goes, you’ve chronicled a few things in your writing that I agree with wholeheartedly.
How are we to trust that he’ll do the right thing and get the debt ceiling raised, given these facts in our way? I can’t find it in me to be as sanguine as you are about predicting Boehner’s final actions in this standoff.
I want to be clear that, despite this danger, I believe that Obama is doing exactly the right thing, for the short-term and long-term. He needs to create a rupture in the GOP House caucus and separate their Tea Partiers from the active governing process. I’m also extremely relieved that the Senate Dems are pushing him to hold his position; sure hope that holds up.
It’s simple. John Boehner is intimately familiar with a class of Republicans who are not under any delusions about the impossibility of allowing the country to default on its debts. The people he respects are telling him what he already knows. He can’t allow a default. Short-term treasuries are already forcing the issue.
So you think John’s going to ask Nancy Smash for almost all the votes. How does that game out? What does Nancy demand for the votes? What happens when the Tea Party tries to oust Boehner from the Speakership? How will Nancy’s demands for the debt ceiling vote affect the new Speaker vote?
May we live in interesting times, right? Me, I’m looking forward to good old uninteresting regular order.
I think, in the end, Boehner will allow a vote without giving Nancy anything, and he’ll force the Dems to save the day.
And the subsequent Speaker vote?
I’ve written about that how many times?
I don’t believe that it’s as predictable as you has previously characterized. Just wanted to see if any subsequent events have altered your perspective.
The chief factor that holds up my optimism about a future Speaker vote is that I don’t see the Tea Party as having the ability to coalesce behind a single leader, and that’s just within its House Caucus. Even if they became able to do that, they would have difficulty in getting enough House GOP moderates to coalesce behind a Tea Party choice to replace Boehner.
On the pessimistic side, we can see that the Tea Party’s brand is chaos, and chaotic circumstances do not lend themselves to predictable outcomes.
But he can get a REALLY cushy job with some very grateful wall street folks, I will bet. Not the worst thing in the world.
not if he defaults.
And then, Obama called Boehner this morning after 10:00 a.m. and repeated he would not negotiate.
I don’t know, BooMan…you’re asking us to trust an active alcoholic. I know better. Who hasn’t heard the very true ‘joke’: How do you tell an alcoholic is lying? His mouth is moving. I don’t believe anything Boehner says.
In this bizarre world, the leverage could be argued back into Nancy’s capable hands to also resolve the budget. In the end, no one is going to be surprised if Nancy isn’t the one who pulls the weeds to a workable solution.
China is pissed, Japan is pissed, they’re talking an intervention to get the R’s to pull their heads out. So much of the fallout from this will be ‘unfixable’ as Ezra put it this morning.
And now we having Susan Collins, the Village’s one true GOP moderate in the Senate, saying that the October 17th deadline is made up nonsense!!
Interesting. What would an “intervention” consist of?
Financial market intervention to stabilize the dollar is my guess. We’ve done it for other currencies, including the yen and the yuan.
That might be useful. Of course useful is a relative term.
Folks trying to save their own economies from turbulence caused by whipsawing currency traders.
I’ve said before, if the western democracies invaded to install a working government I’d support them in a heartbeat.
hah, very nice.
Boo, I sincerely hope you are right! However when I read the word trust connected to John Boehner, I’m sorry I just can’t go there. I’m afraid this will be a down to the deadline. Markets will be effected, international tensions will rise (look at N. Korea today) and we apparently will wait to see who blinks first. That this is occurring in the same time frame of another exercise in brinksmanship that occurred 51 years ago makes the current situation seem that much more ominous to this guy. Like I said, I hope you are right.
This is from a friend I’ve known for sixty years who is a banking consultant and apparently one of the 150 folks Nikki Haley met with yesterday to cheerlead the SC GOP. This is where their head is at:
And one of our common friends replied (you could almost hear the swoon);
Two more days an I expect incoherent babbling beyond word formation.
Boehner thinks its 2011 all over again with Joe Lieberman to bail him out.
My problem here is everyone from the Left side of things believes in what I call facts that default is bad, etc.
The other side is in the same operating mode as the Romney campaign was, the information at hand is all lies and they are being fed information that default isn’t all bad, etc. The bubble that they live in is very tight. We saw that Scalia only sees information from controlled sources, what about the rest of em?
It very possible that they can crash the world economy and then say “who could have thought …” For some of them, that seems to be the plan.
My concern is exactly that it will take crashing through the debt limit to wake enough of them up to vote for government to be able to continue to operate.
But you raise an interesting point. What if after crashing the economy, they are still in their manufactured reality to the point of thinking they can pin it on Democrats. And still refuse to act. We are then in uncharted waters for sure.
whatever happen to the 1 Trillion Dollar coin idea?
It’s among the five workarounds still being debated among policy folks, lawyers, and economists. Nothing quite yet has aligned the politics, law, finance, and economics to be a solid workaround if the Republicans can’t get their act together enough to cave.
I don’t know if a workaround has to be “solid”. I think the prevailing attitude in this case will be “The end justifies the means.” If President Obama were to avert a default by executive action, he could give any justification he wants, and everyone except the hardcore Tea Partiers will accept it with a huge sign of relief. The House Republicans can impeach Obama, but it would get nowhere. And instead of weakening the Presidency, the House Republicans will have only strengthened it — in a bad way.
Obama won’t do anything that’s not constitutionally solid
Alas, I have to agree; Obama always has always been scrupulous and there’s no reason to expect he won’t continue to be. Still, I have to wonder WWLD? (What Would Lincoln Do?) in such an extraordinary crisis.
WWLD, very nice. Obama did sound today like he has a plan, though. one side about the consitutionality – aside from what he mentioned, that it’s no good paying debts with insecure “currency” [sorry, can’t think of the word] because ppl don’t get paid while it’s being litigated and maybe don’t get paid at all – is that the crazies are also going for impeachment.
Oh goody, impeachment. That should take us right up to the 2014 primaries. we saw last year how much American voters love freak-show campaigns.
When someone offered a particularly rude assessment of one of Mencken’s columns, he’d pull out the postcard, sign it and post it. The pre-printed message was “You may be right.”
I do not mean to be dismissive, and this analysis may indeed be right, but I just don’t see the path to it. Whether Boehner is about to retire (I’ve not heard that, but it might be true) or not, he’s tangled himself up but good. I don’t think Boehner can extricate himself from his self-inflicted predicament, but I will be pissed mightily if a Democratic Alexander appears to cut his Gordian Knot. Let the Republicans bury the Republicans.
I think for once President Obama has hit on exactly the right point: If Boehner wants to continue his public charade that the House doesn’t have sufficient votes to pass a clean continuing resolution or an increase in the debt ceiling, prove it. Bring those bills to the floor of the House, and have a vote. Let’s make the record of who’s on the side of fiscal responsibility and who’s trying to burn down the financial house.
Over at No More Mister Nice Blog, Tom Hilton posits a rule-or-ruin strategy at work in the Republican intransigence:
“The power play in the House is, simply put, a tacit admission that they’re unlikely to take back the Presidency anytime soon. It isn’t just that they don’t have the Presidency now; it’s that they think they’ve lost it permanently.”
***
“They know on some level they aren’t going to win the Presidency, so they’re going to do the next best thing: destroy it. And so transfer power to the body they still hold (thanks to a playing field skewed partly by gerrymandering and partly by the concentration of Democrats in urban districts)–which they believe they’re going to keep for a long time to come.”
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2013/10/rule-or-ruin.html
I am beginning to question whether even if he does allow a clean vote the debt ceiling whether the GOP minor traitors–as opposed to tea bagger traitors–can pass it. The conservative media is 100% on fire about how the debt ceiling is a ploy and they’ll prioritize payments.
With the minor traitors having almost nothing to show their opposition to the tea bagger traitors except words, will they really cross them at that supreme moment?
Josh Marshall basically says that any of the proposed solutions will not be believed by the financial sector, but I disagree with that. I believe it’s entirely possible the world will simply ignore this unconstitutional law and the crazy leaders. The world has shown itself capable of tremendous self-delusion and in this case, delusion might well create reality.
But now more each day, I think we’ll see who’s right.
“delusion might well create reality.”
It just might. The debt ceiling’s the law, but nobody understands it and it’s completely useless. That’s the part of the problem rarely talked about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/abolish-debt-ceiling_n_4057989.html
>>>he will have to drop all his demands and go hat in hand to Nancy Pelosi, who can be magnanimous or not, depending on her mood.<<<
Depending on their mood is something that republicans do because they don’t have actual ideas. I would hope that democrats would continue to make decisions based on facts, logic and principle (well, at least sometimes they do).
I think Boehner’s calculation is a simple one:
But which choice? How provincial is his mindset?. There is enormous pressure from around the world including wealthy donors he and the GOP have heavily depended on to choose the country. Then there are his teahadist constituents. What are his family and closest friends like?
I certainly hope you’re right. Yes, the speaker has been saying consistently congress would raise the debt limit, but he’s also been saying consistently a clean vote is not going to happen. He’s lying about one or the other, and I hope you’re right and he’s been lying about the latter, not the former. What he and House Republicans have done up until now is already reckless and irresponsible.