Eve of Destruction

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Where we are: Last night John Boehner made another attempt to get a bill through the House. But the House baggers, on orders from the idiot child running Heritage Action, shut him down. Brett LoGiurato writes at Business Insider that Heritage Action did Harry Reid a big favor.

GOP leadership in the House planned to disrupt the Senate negotiations by pushing forth its own bill to lift the debt ceiling and reopen the government.

The bill might have put Democrats including Harry Reid in an awkward spot because the GOP bill was not going to be wildly unreasonable, but because acquiescing to it would have been acquiescing to “ransom” demands.

But in the end, Harry Reid was not forced into a difficult position.

First, Heritage Action, an influential conservative group that has led the charge to “defund Obamacare” in recent months, came out and urged lawmakers to vote “no” on the House’s legislation, arguing that it didn’t do enough to change the Affordable Care Act.

About an hour later, FreedomWorks echoed Heritage’s key vote of “no,” with President and CEO Matt Kibbe saying the legislation amounted to a “full surrender” from Republicans on Obamacare.

This tells me that neither Kibbe nor Heritage Action’s Michael Needham are bright enough to find shit in an outhouse. However, today Needham told a Fox News interviewer,

“Well everybody, understands that we’ll not be able to repeal this law until 2017,” Needham said Wednesday. “We have to win the Senate and win the White House. Right now it is clear that this bill is not ready for prime time. It is clear the bill is unfair.”

And this tells me that somebody over Needham’s head just jerked Needham’s leash. But as David Kurtz said, “Thanks for the last two weeks?”

Some pundits, possibly reading tea leaves, are predicting that Boehner will allow whatever bill the Senate sends to the House today to be voted on by the entire House, where everybody says there are enough votes to pass it, and have been all along. Let’s hope.

Update: Both TPM and Politico are reporting that the deal worked out between Reid and McConnell in the Senate will go to the House first, where Boehner has agreed to allow it to go to a vote, and it is expected to pass with mostly Dem votes. TPM says,

The Senate deal lifts the debt ceiling through Feb. 7, re-opens the shuttered government through Jan. 15 and sets up bicameral budget conference tasked with sending policy recommendations by Dec. 13. It will include a provision to enforce a part of Obamacare where subsidy recipients have to verify their income eligibility first. It won’t include a previously considered plan to delay a reinsurance tax under the health care law. Ultimately neither side will make big concessions.

Assuming the House passes this, the Senate will vote next. It is believed that Ted Cruz will not try to delay a Senate vote, because then he would be taking sole ownership of everything that happens after, and it is believed that he isn’t stupid enough to do that. We’ll see.

11 thoughts on “Eve of Destruction”

  1. From reading and watching this morning, it looks like the Senate’s ready with a fairly reasonable plan.
    And “Squeaker” Boehner has enough votes lined up, to get it through the House.

    The question that remains, is, will either Senator Cruz-ader, or his Mini-Lee, decide out of spite, to put a 30-hour hold on it?

    I suspect that like decades of petulant children in the backseats of cars, they will try to get in one more smack at the sibling they hate!

    And if that causes the car to veer off the road into a ditch, well, that’ll be the fault of the sibling and the parents!!!

  2. I think there is a desire to get Orangeman to pass the Senate agreement first in the House, for two reasons. One to make sure he doesn’t screw the deal after the Senate GOP sticks their necks out, and two, because Senate rules allow special privileges to bills coming over from the House, so Reid could perhaps keep Cruz in check. Let’s hope.

    I won’t believe it’s over until all the votes are in and Obama has signed it. Even then, it’s only really extending things a few months. We’ll see if the GOP has learned anything.

  4. Thanks for the backstory on the demise of the House bill by Needham and his myopic pals.

    Ezra Klein (sorry no link) said that this Republican brinkmanship is actually a blessing for ObamaCare, because were it not for this wild Congressional hostage taking, the news would be focused on the apparent IT disaster that is HealthCare.gov – the not-ready-for-primetime website for the federally run health exchanges. Apparently the states that opted to create and run their own exchanges have fared much better, IT-wise.

    I thought I would never be saying this, but thank God for Mitch McConnell. From McConnell Delivers, Boehner Can’t:

    God bless Mitch McConnell.

    The Senate Republican leader isn’t an especially lovable figure. Even many of his fellow conservatives are lukewarm about him.

    He’s colorless and charisma-free. He’s a thoroughgoing partisan who has launched more filibusters than any Senate leader in history. He’s a relentless fan of unlimited campaign spending and a bitter opponent not just of Obamacare but of all things Obama. Asked in 2010 to describe his highest legislative goal, he said it was to make sure Barack Obama was a one-term president.

    But the wily Kentuckian is also an old-fashioned legislative strategist who can count votes, discern when his party is holding a losing hand and make the decision to cut a deal.

    That’s what McConnell did this week when he sat down with his Democratic counterpart, the equally unlovable Harry Reid of Nevada, and struck a bargain to reopen the federal government and avert the danger of a default on the national debt.

    “No one wants a default,” McConnell said. “So let’s put this hysterical talk of default behind us and instead start talking about finding solutions.”

    McConnell took a distinct political risk in agreeing to extend the federal debt ceiling until February with almost no strings attached. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a fundraising group that backs primary challenges to Republicans it deems insufficiently hard-line, denounced him for “negotiating surrender.” (This column won’t do him much good either.)

    But McConnell could read the polls. The longer the government shutdown continued and the closer the nation came to a politically induced financial crisis, the more the GOP was losing.

    And McConnell, a ferocious enforcer of discipline, knew he could deliver most of his party’s votes. “There are few things more daunting in politics,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) once said, “than the determined opposition of Sen. McConnell.”…

  6. One potentially positive result will be to see how the individual House members vote to accept the Senate bill because it will be purely based on whether to continue the shutdown and allow a default when they know that that objective is impossible to obtain. They will no longer have the security of hiding among themselves with a sense of unity.
    Aside from Bachmann who is too stupid to understand the implications of her actions; I suspect they all will be or should be scrambling to wash this debacle from their hands.
    We’ll see who the die hards are as we go about mopping up the pockets of resistance.

  8. Oh, that ted cruz, shoves his hand in a meat grinder and brags about his bravery. Screwing a donkey, for your viewing pleasure; like Tijuana in the old days. Let us know when you’ve had enough.

  9. I saw this CNN Online headline, “Stenographer Rants on House Floor,” and wondered which of our MSM “reporters” or punTWITs it was who snapped.

    http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/17/stenographer-snaps-rants-on-house-floor/?hpt=hp_t2

    Whooops!
    I turns out it was the REAL House Stenographer who snapped, and she went on some religious rant.
    Too close a proximity to our yammering hypocritical faux Christian Conservatives and Republicans, maybe?

  11. Swami, you have a genuine talent as a DJ. I always enjoy your picks. At our age weddings are rare. Are you available for wakes and funerals?

    So we dodged a bullet for the time being. I guess we can have the hope that the big money boys will pinch the propaganda supply to rein in the angry mobs they’ve created and slowly the bitter fruit will wither on the vine.

    I’ll have to use the only barometer I have, which is the number of right wing rants and “Endtimes” prophecies I encounter by pure happenstance. It’s not very accurate, but it’s all I have.

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