Well, sure, if you want to listen to ALL the people, there may be other, wrong views… but the GOP leadership is careful to listen to only the TRUE Scotsmen – er, the TRUE Tea Partiers – er, the REAL Americans!
I’m not sure anyone thinks the Republicans are especially willing to compromise compared to the Democrats.
A 6 month hiatus would push the battle directly into the election period. That is the point of the delay. Bagger central sees the debt ceiling as a positive campaign issue. That way they get to use it at least twice.
Why should we wait to do what has always been done automatically? Because the rightys see a campaign issue that will appeal to the Not so bright and illogical.
BOTH. Both parties will not budge! Obama keeps pushing the same plan over and over again, and the Pubbies keep rejecting it. The Capitol is a broken record, friend.
That’s cool; everyone makes mistakes.
Only a factual one.
You really think that a $4 trillion spending-and-revenue plan is the same as a $2.4 trillion spending-only plan? Obama also pushed a “clean increase”, which seems to be a third plan. And he said he would accept the McConnell fallback, a fourth plan.
The only things he has refused is entitlement reform without revenue increases (which the public hates) and a BBA (which obviously can’t pass the Senate anyways). And he doesn’t want a short extension, but it seems he’ll go along with that if necessary.
Why do you think there’s a debt limit in the first place? If it’s supposed to just be raised without any question whenever the debt gets close to it, why even have it?
The question answers itself: The debt ceiling was put in place precisely to force Congress to make hard decisions in order to get an agreement to raise it if the debt ballooned. The fact that in the past the debt ceiling was raised without much debate and without conditions is actually a symptom of the failure of Washington to manage its affairs responsibly.
If you take the debt ceiling seriously, then you SHOULD be looking at ways to make sure that if you raise it, it’s hopefully the last time it needs to be raised, or at least you’re putting the government on a path to getting the debt under control.
The worst thing about Congress is its tendency to kick problems down the road to another Congress, or to ‘solve’ problems by promising to set up a toothless commission to make recommendations on how to solve the problem. That’s exactly what Obama did with the debt problem - he established a commission, then promptly ignored what they recommended when he didn’t like the answer.
Kudos to the Republicans for actually treating the law like it means something.
terrorism??? Is your sense of perspective that far out of whack?
Oh, come on. The only conditions they want are conditions that directly address the fiscal problems the debt ceiling is designed to force them to address. There’s no slippery slope here. If they tried to slip in some social engineering nonsense as a condition of raising the debt ceiling, I’d be the first one to call them on it.
If you can’t get Washington to agree to make difficult choices to avoid a default, just when do you expect these difficult choices to be made?
You are correct. There is no reason to have the debt ceiling vote at all. It should be at the request of the President and not be allowed to be rejected.
I heard on the tube that big business and the financial pros are trying to reach the tea baggers. They told them to make a damn deal and make it fast. It will be interesting to see if the baggers understand whose money put them in. I suspect some of them are believers and will not budge.
So will Republicans make the difficult choice to raise taxes to reduce the deficit? I didn’t think so.
To paraphrase General Patton: “Governing doesn’t mean making having to make difficult choices; it means making the other poor bastard make difficult choices.”
I agree with you that kicking the issue into the election season would create… um… another issue to be debated by the candidates. Frankly, I don’t think I can fathom a more important issue to be debated, wrt to the health and survivability of the country (well, maybe the global war on terrorism, but so far as I’ve seen, Obama has played it how the GOP would have were McCain elected, you may feel free to differ [Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc]).
Elections are about making choices. Why is this such a bad choice to have, when the public is paying attention? Why wouldn’t we want such a debate when the public is really paying attention, like they would during an election? If you consider the debt ceiling as a proxy for the size/footprint of the Federal government in our lives, and I do, then kicking it down the road is the right thing to do.
PS: Which I think is why Obama doesn’t want to face this then. Again, politically understandable.
PPS: Not exactly automatically, in the sense that there’s always a vote required. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, your president did vote against raising it when he had the chance.
As Yahoo pointed out this morning, the one word the President didn’t use during his campaign speech yesterday was ‘veto’. I’m absolutely sure that was intentional.
Because Republicans always telegraph their intentions before they have to.
I’m afraid I’m not following you.
You seem to think that Obama won’t veto anything, because he didn’t announce that intention in his speech. I can only assume that is what Republicans do, and you now expect it from Democrats.
I think he didn’t mention it because he wanted to leave himself an out. If Boehner’s plan passes (the smaller ceiling lift until Feb or March) or if the previous plan gets passed (Reid’s $2.7T with bullshit assumptions), he now can grudgingly go along with it, playing up his ‘adult in the room’ meme, without looking that he backtracked on a commitment from last night.
Feel free to read the yahoo analysis yourself, here.
Why would he? What plan that has a chance to pass the House and Senate would he veto? CC&B and the BBA are DOA. The Boehner plan might not even pass the House, and almost certainly can’t pass the Senate. The Reid plan he already endorsed. The McConnell fallback he endorsed. There is literally no viable plan out there that doesn’t work for Obama.
All it requires is for the Democrats to not fold up in the Senate - and so far they have followed solidly.
ETA: Club for Growth just came out against Boehner’s plan as well. I don’t see how it passes the House now, even with Cantor’s urging.
Read the link in post 315
I actually just did - and it pretty much agreed with what I just said. Their take-away seemed to be that if Boehner’s passes and Reid’s fails then the Senate might pass Boehner’s and Obama might have to sign it. I don’t disagree with that, but don’t consider it very likely (especially since large blocks of GOP Reps have already come out against it).
I think the must more likely scenario is that they both fail (or, maybe, Boehner’s passes and somehow Reid’s overcomes a filibuster) and we get something in between the two as a compromise that requires Dem majorities in both houses to pass (if Reid’s passes then I think Boehner almost has to give it a vote in the House).
And it will essentially be for nothing - discretionary spending cuts with no long-term fix to entitlements, no tax reform, and no new revenue. So we get to do this all over again in a few months. Business as usual.
CONGRESS! Y U NO AGREE ON ANYTHING? Rage comics. They say everything that we have a hard time expressing with words.
Agreed, we should get rid fo the debt limit. Congress already votes on the expenditure and they need to have a way to fund it at the same time. Certainly in my lifetime the debt limit was raised without question until the current manufactured crisis.
Raise it and lets make a real and comprehensive plan on cutting spending, raising taxes, fixing medicare. We should also have a seperate discussion on social security since that should be a seperate issue.
Or we can let a manufactured crisis raise costs for everyone.