To be fair, Obama hasn’t had a bill sent to him yet to either sign or veto. Nor has he put anything forward himself, notwithstanding his class warfare campaign speech of a few days ago. He’s letting his proxies in Congress do the heavy lifting, much like with Obamacare.
Edit to add: I see Team Wonton wants a deal to get done, to protect their investments. Based on the games they play themselves (not allowing their currency to float based on the market, so as to keep their exports artificially cheap), they have some balls.
Boehner’s BBA addition is just a political gimmick. This is what he wants to happen: The addition of the BBA gets his Tea Party caucus in line, and the vote passes the House. It then goes to the Senate, where it either gets shot down completely, in which case he can try to pin the blame on the Senate, or the Senate acts more soberly and simply removes the provision for a BBA from their own bill and passes that. Then it will go back to the House for reconciliation, at which point the deadline will be on them and the Tea Party Caucus will have the political cover they needed to swallow hard and accept the Senate changes, and the bill will go to the President without the BBA.
If the Senate adds more changes, such as adding taxes or taking away some other key feature, then the whole thing could come apart in reconciliation and there will be no time left to do anything before the Aug 2. deadline. At that point, the Treasury will miraculously discover a mechanism to continue payments for another week or two, and the Kabuki theater will start again. Eventually, something will pass and there will be no default.
All true, but he also did announce an immediate veto of one or two pending bills should they reach his desk, which killed the momentum on those bills. I think one of them was even Harry Reid’s bill, wasn’t it?
In this case, Obama and the Democrats are playing smarter than the Republicans. It’s like the old adage of bargaining: The first person to name a price loses. In this case, they’re sitting back and allowing Republicans to name the price. This gives them asymmetric knowledge which they can exploit by waiting until the last minute to throw their own plan out there, framed in such a way that it’s hard for the Republicans to refuse, and without enough time left for a serious debate.
Or, they can simply accept the least-worst Republican plan, and then frame everything that happens in the economy from this point forward as the fault of those damned Republicans and their crazy Tea Party economy-wrecking partners.
But if they put their own plan out there and it gets accepted, they own it.
If that’s the case, then it’s the GOP who are acting as the adults in the room, by taking the hits in the court of public opinion while still trying to save the country’s finances.
That is an absolutely atrocious article. There’s absolutely no chance the US will default on the interest payments for its debt. Well no shit, Sherlock. That’s a piece of absolutely astonishing reasoning, given that the only thing everybody agrees with in this whole fucking mess is that T-bill interest is the first spending priority.
But absent a raised debt ceiling, there is 100% chance that the US will default on financial obligations already undertaken. Employees going unpaid for work already done. Contractors going unpaid for services already rendered. Contracts already signed being broken.
That might not be a bond default, but is sure as shit a default. Run your household like that and your credit rating will go straight into the shitter. Run your country like that and no one is going to believe you when you promise to pay for something. Which, when the “no one” in question is Moody’s, is called a downgrade.
Agreed, we’ve got millions of people who depend on that government funded contract that is used to pay the F-35 prime contractor, the IT guy who services computers in DHS, and other government contractors. My friends tell me that a lot of individual contract people in the DC area are very, very nervous about this getting resolved, because they know they’re going to be the first to be gutted if the issue is not resolved.
Question: Does the new Boehner plan require an up or down vote on a BBA for the second debt increase, or does it require the BBA to PASS Congress and be sent to the states?
Either way it’s not binding. A future law before the second debt increase could repeal either one of the requirements.
snerk You can’t be serious, here. Using “acting as the adults” and “GOP” in the same sentence.
Look, I’m no fan of the Congressional Democrats, myself. They roll over more than Fido. They fold more often than I do at the poker table. They stick together less than the brothers from Oasis. Their backbones are practically nonexistent. You get the picture.
But it ain’t the GOP who are acting like adults here. They’re holding their breaths until they turn blue, until even Boehner has to give them more than he wanted to, just to get a vote on something that has absolutely no chance .. none .. of becoming law. And they’re perfectly happy gambling the full faith and credit of the freakin’ United States Government on their little show.
And I don’t think for a second that the true believers of the Tea Party think they are “taking the hits in the court of public opinion.” I think they believe the “true Americans” are the ones standing behind them, fighting against the tyranny of raising the debt ceiling, holding the line to protect our valuable “job creators,” and who would welcome default as a better outcome than a return to 2000-era tax rates.
Watching just a bit of the House debate this afternoon was sickening. To hear the GOP side roar in response to Boehner’s brave words, and then try to shout down a Democratic amendment (that also had zero chance of passing in the first place). Yep. Real adults there.
Chuck Schumer was saying something similar to this on the Senate floor. He used the analogy of an American family not paying their credit card bill or not paying their car payment, but let’s at least be fair and say it straight:
We need to take out another “credit card” to make the minimum payments on our current credit card. This isn’t simply living up to a debt obligation. It has gotten so bad that we can’t pay our previous debt without taking on more debt.
Yeah, Bush did it with a GOP Congress, so what? When do we stop it? When we don’t qualify for the next credit card?
Y’know, when the credit card company is offering a deal with a less than 1% interest rate, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to sign up for a new credit card. Meanwhile, you see about asking your boss for a raise, so you’ll be able to pay down that debt when it becomes necessary.
And what’s all this talk about Obama not offering any plan? Last I checked, he’s offered at least three, and would support yet others.
I hear what you are saying, Uncle, but did you read the context, ie my reply to Sam’s comment? The GOP could have not introduced their own plan and just threw darts at Reid’s (Lord knows Obama hasn’t found the time to put one out… guess he’s out playing golf). If the GOP knows that putting a plan out will get them killed, but does so anyway because it moves the ball forward in the process to avert quasi-default, then that’s what I meant by playing the adult; it’s practically statesmanship.
You could make an even stronger argument, taking this meme forward, about Paul Ryan’s plan to save Medicare. He put a plan out there when your boy was out screwing around, and took the arrows for it. But at least he did something - something that the Dem-controlled Senate (and House 2007-2010) could have but never did.
You hate the GOP and their policies, I’m guessing, and that’s fine. But this independent feels that doing what’s right for the country, even though it damages you politically - that’s leadership. I’ve only seen one example of that on the left in the last few years - Obamacare. Ramming a bill down the throats of a country that clearly didn’t want it, knowing that they’d get their asses reamed (which they did, in spades) at the next election, because they felt it was the right thing to do. While I’m personally against that monstrosity (anyone see how the latest CMS figures show that, surprise surprise, it will cost way more than thought…), I give credit for Obama actually fulfilling a campaign promise and following through on an unpopular plan.
I agree the true test of statesmanship is making tough choices, doing things that you think are in the country’s best interests even if they aren’t in your political best interests. I hear you there. I give Paul Ryan credit there, too. I mean, I may not like much of his plan, but he did put something out there. I’d love it if his plan served as a discussion starter so we could actually get something done to get entitlements under control.
Congress in toto, Dem or GOP, hasn’t done jack squat about this issue all year. The Dems … probably because they’re mostly giant pussies, and the GOP because they wanted this crisis to score political points. I’m not carrying anybody’s water here. But … any plan that doesn’t include some reasonable revenue generators (tax increases, if you will) isn’t a serious plan. That goes for Reid and the Senate Dem pussies, too, by the way.
In other news … yay for my state? Was Iowa the only state that had their entire delegation vote against the Boehner measure? Braley, Loebsack and Boswell because they’re Democrats, King because he’s a nutcase/Tea Partyist/Bachmannite, and Latham … well, I’m not sure about him.
Enough with this meme of Obama not offering anything in this crisis, by the way. He floated a plan that made some changes to the sacrosanct Democratic foundation of Social Security and Medicare (minor as they may have been), that made a lot of politicians on his side upset and uncomfortable. So you should give him some credit for that, instead of “playing golf.”
If the Republicans were so high minded with no chance of success, then why didn’t they put forth a bill earlier this week to get the process started?
And polls showed that the majority of people want health care reform and/or thought that Obamacare didn’t go far enough.
I’m an independant voter as well, and my guiding principles are "rat fuck the moral majory or their current incarnation, and elect the most fically responsible person in the race.
