Harry Reid is Dr. No
We’ve gone from Cap, Cut & Balance on the House side of Capitol Hill, to Parry, Squash & Demagogue in the Senate:
House Speaker John Boehner’s plan to raise the debt limit and reduce the deficit will be quickly defeated tonight, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today.
The Republican-led House will vote on Boehner’s plan in the late afternoon. It’s unclear whether the speaker will have enough support in his caucus to pass the measure, which would increase the U.S. borrowing limit by up to $900 billion while cutting more than $900 billion in spending over the next decade.
With one Democrat out for health reasons today, Boehner needs 216 votes to pass his bill and can afford to lose 24 Republicans. In the early afternoon, CBS News tallied at least 17 Republicans who will vote against it and nine who are leaning against it. Fifty were undecided.
If the bill does pass, Reid said today he would take it to the Senate floor for a vote immediately — where the Democratic majority will reject it.
Reid has yet to call for a vote on his own plan, which remains a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in empty promises.
I really think this should be the last one. Once Boehner gets the votes to pass this plan, which will probably need another rewrite, the House should go home until the Senate passes something. We’ve already offered up two plans to the Democrat’s zero. If that doesn’t put the blame on them nothing will, so we might as well force the budget to balance and get hung for the ewe.
Well said Jeff, then they own it.
What are we rooting for here? What’s the best realistic outcome? I’m not confident I even know what’s a good result and what’s a bad result.
Tim,
I root for the freshmen to vote this thing down.
I root for Boehner to be voted out of his position, and for Cantor to replace him.
I root for Reid to kill this lousy plan as soon as it gets to the Senate, as he says he will. That’s a two-fer. The bill gets killed and the Dems can be blamed.
I root for a sane solution… but that is not gonna happen. A sane government would not let it come to this.
I root for this to awaken America as to how bad it really is in DC. I root for even more blood in the next elections. I root for more old-timers to get thrown out. I root for primary challenges to old guard Republicans.
I root for a long shutdown of government, not a short one. A short one means we’ll get some lousy Boehner-like compromise. A long one means we will get some real spending cuts and no tax hikes.
I am rooting for the guillotine at this point. Reading all the news today, it is just all so sickening.
I would like to point out that we have already won some significant victories. We have already established a link between the debt ceiling and getting deficits under control. We have also established that reducing deficits is going to be done almost exclusively with spending cuts. I’m not convinced that we’ve gotten everything we could out of this fight, but even if we get trivial cuts right now we’re still coming away ahead. Budget season is coming up, which will provide us with another battle to get spending under control.
2010 was never about turning back the welfare state. Anyone who thought so was a deluded fool. It was about holding the line and prepping the ground for 2012, where we have a real chance to get enough power to truly turn things around. By that metric the House Republicans have done their job. The Democrats are talking about cuts and tax increases, which are never as popular as cuts alone. We’ve also exposed the President as very unpresidential.
I hate to say it — and this is only after long consideration — but with Republicans controlling nothing but the House, I root for pretending to pass some phoney stop-gap non-saving nonsense non-binding faux bill that is designed to shape the budget for tennnnn looooonnnggg years, but which in reality we will shred in January 2013.