Me, on September 13th:
It looks increasingly like the House Republicans are on a suicide mission. It’s like they are hell-bent on making an amphibious landing on some beachhead against entrenched machine gun nests and heavy artillery fire without the benefit of any air cover. They are going to get cut to ribbons.
Speaker Boehner admits that he cannot come up with a plan to finance the government and pay its debts that wont be shot down by friendly-fire from his own caucus. That means that he will need to either consent to a government shutdown or go hat-in-hand to Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and ask for their support in avoiding a catastrophe. But he doesn’t seem to want to do that preemptively, so he is still floundering around trying to appease his own Teahadist base.
I could have written that an hour ago, only changing “government shutdown” to “default on our debts.”
I am actually kind of fighting a feeling of contempt for people who are acting surprised or afraid.
This outcome was so obvious that it should have been easy to see for more keen observers of American politics.
We are, right now, exactly where we want to be. We are, right now, exactly where we are supposed to be. John Boehner was in the same situation on September 13 that he is in tonight. Nothing has changed. The Democrats did not flinch. The Tea Party did not flinch.
Boehner always had one choice: give the president what he wants or cause a global economic catastrophe. That is the choice he has right now, and it is not actually a hard decision. He will make the responsible choice. Eventually.