Speaker Boehner is hilariously incompetent. He’s trying to round up votes from his raucous caucus and he’s screwing everything up. First he got kneecapped by the Club for Growth and the National Taxpayers Union. Then he got caught trying to punk his caucus with a misleading PowerPoint presentation. And now the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has given a crappy score to his bill that shows it would save a mere $850 billion over the next decade. He’s making George W. Bush look like an able administrator.
I’m sure the Tea Party appreciates his efforts to pull the wool over their eyes.
Only one thing left he can do:
Drink!
It would appear that he’s already been doing plenty of that, from these blunders…
There’s always the Indiana Jones solution
I honestly don’t understand this from Boehner’s office. Is his entire staff incompetent? Do they want him to fail? Have they given up?
And yeah – the Club for Growth and the NTU are throwing anvils at him. So did the Heritage Foundation and Freedomworks.
How much abuse can one orange-tinted man take?
What the market thinks about all this, according to Reuters:
Bottom line: Investors have to keep buying US government securities because they continue, even if the “default” happens, to be the lowest risk investments in the market.
Of course, investing in putting people back to work would deliver greater returns but the financial world is still sitting in the corner sucking their collective thumbs.
I’ve heard someone suggest that this is the real tea party position:
While I’m sure not every member of the insane caucus is in line with this thinking, it does fit a lot of the writing that has come out from that group.
The problem with the analysis, of course, is (2). Even before last night most people were seeing the problem as the GOP, and after Mr Compromise went up against Mr My-Way-or-the-Highway it was even more clear.
But that is what the Fox News cocoon has created — the largest case of groupthink in human history. The tea partiers consistently overestimate how popular their positions are on basically every topic.
The other problem with this logic is that even their supporters know that it based on a lie and that the Tea Party is the one who wants the default.
So wait, TPM reporting that Boehner’s office are “rewriting” the bill. What?? Boner really is a joke isn’t he. So they’ve scuttled the voter that was “scheduled” for tomorrow and they are gonna what, find how many more cuts that they couldn’t even find before in oh what 2 days??? How the heck did Boehner get the job a speaker anyway? Say what you will about Nancy Smash, but she held her caucus together…period!
Nancy got shyt done, and did it in Dior and Jimmy Choos, with nary a hair out of place.
And it was a much harder caucus to hold together.
I’d dispute that. The Democratic caucus is more ideologically fractured, but Pelosi was dealing with rational actors for the most part. She was able to predict what they might need in order to support her and know from the outset whether she’d be able to deliver or not. And she knew she could horse trade on a lot of things. She also knew which battles she wasn’t going to be able to win – like the budget battle that her Blue Dogs were not going to let her win in an election year.
Boehner has a less ideologically fractured caucus, but it’s full of people who have an ideological aversion to compromise. He can’t predict what’s going to be acceptable to them because they keep moving the goal posts on him. Because they don’t want a compromise at all – compromise is weakness to them – so when it looks like he might be successful, they move the line.
So both caucuses are difficult, but in different ways. And Pelosi’s caucus was more predictable even when they were more likely to be fractured along ideological lines.
There’s no way they pass Boehner’s plan. It only cuts the spending by $5 billion next year, and the deficit by $1 billion.
Moreover, they’re only going to be more pissed with him, as you’ve said. Who wants to play over-under for the next Speaker?
August 2nd. (More like over-over).
I was watching Majority Report, and Ryan Grim thinks that Obama’s speech was setting the country up for default.
Speaker’s tricky. They can resign voluntarily, but they can’t easily be ejected. Suspension of the rules — and you’d have to do it, because the rules ordinarily allow the election of a Speaker only at the beginning of a biennium, or on the office falling vacant — requires 2/3s of the House.
Having suspended the rules, then such an action could go forward.
Well it’s rare a White House official is ever “fired.” Can Boehner sustain this amount of pressure combined with his alcoholism? He’s getting thwacked every which way, and publicly complained about going up against the President one-on-one. He isn’t going to last much longer.
One wonders how long it will be before he’ll have his Wilbur Mills moment.
So this is what Ezra Klein meant yesterday when he said the Republicans won? $850 billion over 10 years and only $1 billion from the deficit? When I was a kid I “won” a four inch tall stuffed Bugs Bunny in the local arcade’s claw machine. It was probably worth about 50 cents. Cost me $6 in quarters. But I “won” something so I, you know, rocked.
Really anxious for Ezra to reach 30.
Maybe Ezra is in on the Kabuki.
This is starting to play out like Inception. Except – outside of Boehner’s tan – the special effects are weak and the performances by actors in a supporting role (Tea Party caucus) are scary bad. Also too – the script changes are hard to keep up with.
Have you noticed he’s become more red, less orange? maybe all the Jack Daniels. Don’t have teevee though so I’m relying on internet photos and it may all be photoshopped
How did a bunch of freshmen congressmen gain so much power? Half of the 87 freshmen have never held elected office. The system has failed. We are being held hostage by a bunch of fucking idiots.
and they were all/ most probably recruited by the Koch bros on the basis of how easily bought they are
a greedy bunch of fucking idiots.
Please, impeach the president:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/25/republican-rep-warns-of-obama-impeachment-if-gop-forces-debt-d
efault/
DO IT!
What if no deal of any kind can be struck for a cut-containing measure that will pass both houses?
What if it’s the eleventy-59th minute on August 1 with no other legislative solution in sight?
What if Boehner, in a fog of funk and Jim Beam, calls for a voice vote on a simple up-or-down clean raising, sits through the bellowing uproar, and declares it passed whether or not it really does? Then it’s off to the Senate, they ram it through on another voice vote, and Obama signs it?
Would that work?