Posted on 08/01/2011 4:36:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Everyone seems pretty cross at this juncture in the fight over raising the debt limit. As this is written, the House has just passed the bill that Speaker John Boehner yanked from the floor Thursday night and then revised with a balanced-budget amendment on Friday. The Senate has yet to pass Majority Leader Harry Reid's measure that in many but not all respects is not that much different.
It looks like the Senate will approve Reid's measure and that the two bills, framed in a way that makes compromise relatively easy, will be melded into one version that could be passed by bipartisan majorities of both houses in time to meet the supposedly hard deadline of Tuesday, Aug. 2.
But it's not certain everything will work out, and in the meantime nobody's very happy about the whole situation.
Democrats seem especially unhappy. They could have avoided the fight in the first place by raising the debt ceiling in the lame duck session in December, when they had large majorities in both houses of Congress.
But they decided not to. Reid's comments then suggested that he expected the issue to split the House Republicans, pitting the leadership against the 87 Tea Party-sympathizing freshmen. The leaders would have to agree to a tax increase in order to get a deal, with a party schism like the one that followed George H.W. Bush's agreement to a tax increase in 1990.
That didn't happen. Instead Reid abandoned his demand for a tax increase. The reason, I think, is that he hasn't had a 50-vote majority for a tax increase in the Senate, just as Senate Democrats haven't been able to pass a budget.
All of which left Barack Obama looking somewhat ridiculous when he called for more taxes in his televised speech Monday night. When you're trying to show you're leading and your followers have already gone off in another direction, you tend to look like something other than a leader.
Some Democrats, in frustration, have said House Republicans are acting "almost like a dictatorship" or are using "terrorist tactics." But in opposing tax increases, House Republicans are just being true to the voters who gave them in November 2010 a larger majority than they have won since 1946.
Other Democrats have taken to blaming Obama. Robert Reich, labor secretary in the Clinton administration, decries an empty bully pulpit. Paul Krugman, the trade economist who writes partisan vitriol for The New York Times, talks about a centrist copout.
Such complaints seem to ignore a lesson that Democrats were happy to teach Republicans after November 2008: Elections have consequences.
Our Constitution does not allow the Republicans, who won big in 2010, to immediately repeal Obamacare and pare back spending to 2007 levels, and they're pretty frustrated about that. Enough of them remained obdurate to prevent Boehner's bill from passing Thursday and to push him to include a provision supposedly forcing passage of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.
All of which weakens Boehner's bargaining position and may mean a final bill less tilted to Republican demands. But, as many Democrats note, the battle is being fought over how much spending to cut, which means that Republicans are winning. The question is just how much.
Democrats went into this fight with a precedent in mind, the budget fight between President Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995-96. The conventional wisdom is that Clinton won that fight and Republicans lost.
That's not quite right: After shifting to noticeably more moderate policies, Clinton was re-elected in 1996, but Republicans lost few House seats and held onto their congressional majorities at the same time.
The difference this time is that Obama has not shifted policies noticeably, but instead has seemed to position himself as a complainer on the sidelines, asking voters to call their congressman. He has presented no specific plan of his own. His chief of staff reports that he hasn't spoken at all to Boehner lately.
Just as he left the specifics of the stimulus package and Obamacare to congressional Democrats, so he has left the framing of an alternative to Harry Reid, whose Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget resolution in two years.
On Friday, the Gallup poll showed Obama's job approval down to 40 percent, the lowest of his presidency. Voters are cross with everybody, but he has the most to lose.
I keep waiting for details about the date the ‘cuts’ will begin. Does anyone know what that is?
Anyway, the amount of cuts (spaced over 10 years) is laughably piddling when you consider our total debt.
Also, The Libyan conflict is a ticking time bomb set to detonate in our faces at any instant! If “O” keeps the US in Libya, how can we save money OR succeed there, if the Military is gutted?
It seems like the ‘deal’ is being made and refined in a vacuum, where unplanned and overwhelming events routinely nullify even the BEST of deals, (which I am certain this one is not and will not become)
You got that right.
We lost this. I don’t care how you slice it.
The committees that will come up, will be all over the news when the time comes, and R’s are going to get blamed for cutting medicare AND cutting the military.
Boehner is a bonehead.
First off, Dems don’t care if granny suffers. They don’t care if the military gets cut. The ONLY thing they care about, is getting on TV and saying the republicans cut such things.
Already, I am seeing commercials on the television with old folks claiming congress is cutting their medicare (which means Republicans, dontcha know)
Why does it have to be old folks?
The deal should not have been “come to an agreement or we are going to cut medicare and the military” the dems win on BOTH of those points.
The deal should have been “come to an agreement by this date, or all welfare to illegal immigrants is cut off immediately”.
Better yet, how about really tackling the problems... like anchor babies and the cost they have on our economy? Or welfare for illegals? Or foreign aid?
How about this? Come to an agreement by such and such a date with your committee, or gub’mint workers lose the right to organize?
No, we lost this, I don’t care what they say. The dems are great on this sort of stuff, they think long term, they think in election cycles, where repubs think about “getting along”.
The only good thing about this last 2 weeks, is it cast in stone the RINO’s and flushed them out (in case some folks who are slow on the uptake didn’t get it before). The “hop-along get’along” gang were flushed out like roaches when you turn on the light switch.
The RINO’s stuck it to us again, they handed the dems some long term campaign issues to use against us, and we got nothing in return. Nothing. Deficit reduction? Your kidding me. When all is said and done, they raised the ceiling, and that reduction, after all yearly adjustments will turn out to be another increase. I bet it doesn’t save 10 bucks over 10 years.
Oh, some will claim that we saved the bond market. BS, the bond market is a bubble. How can someone invest in something that has more debt than income and no oversight? Folks who invest in the US Bond market need to have a wake up call. All these municipalities, and the fed floating bonds to pay pensions are out of their mind, and it deserves to crumble under it’s own weight. The pill will be smaller to handle now, than 10 years from now.
Sorry for the rant, but this deal stinks to high heaven, and I am listening to folks on the radio celebrating as if it was VDay. I’m sorry, but I think its more like a gallows laugh than anything else.
If you took accurate enough samples, you’d find the human body, on average, contains 0.000 000 13 percent uranium. So hey, as Sgt. Esterhaus used to say, ‘let’s be careful out there.’
The Republicans had all the weapons at their disposal. If the debt limit is not raised, then congress has to change the budget to fit revenues. All spending bills originate in the House, conrolled by Republicans. The GOP missed a golden opportunity.
>>Soon we will not be able to pay the interest on the debt.<<
Hey, Daily Kos troll, that’s EXACTLY what the Tea Party has been saying all along. Cut spending in real terms - not this phony accounting garbage.
I challenged one of my Communist senator’s aides on the phony accounting. He tried to defend it with “CBO scored it that way” and “that’s how it’s done in Washington”. My response was “I don’t care who does it, it is still phony accounting.”
Typical clueless lame stream media
“All spending bills originate in the House, conrolled by Republicans.”
Yes, and in order to become law, all spending bills need to be passed by the (Democratic) Senate and signed by the (Democratic) president. The Republican House passed the Paul Ryan budget but it didn’t accomplish anything because the Senate ignored it.
ULTIMATELY, the real test as to the appropriateness of this action by McConnell and Boehner will be in the polls.
LEST WEEK, Obama was between -18 and -21 in Rasmussen’s daily tracking polls.
The MOST IMPORTANT objective for the GOP is to kick this bastard out of office in 2012. If this agreement strenghthens Obama’s hand, its all over for the GOP, McConnell, Boehner and America.
He will mold the SCOTUS to reflect his Maxist, Globalist, Islamophilic views.
you are a 100% right that our best route during this two years is incremental improvements. We stopped the bleeding of the previous four years of Democrat rule on the Hill. I am more than comfortable with the first half of this deal. I have major concerns about the ramifications of the commission and penaties if the commission plan is not adopted. I know details are trickling out. I hope our tea party base works to strengthen the rules for this committee to avoid taxes and set the perameters for the cuts allowed. We can’t afford to give the left victories in the year of an elections...and to be able to pawn it off on the supercommitteee. I’d also like McConnell and Boehner announce their committee members...especially McConnell. i am sure the House members will be fine.
However, given the way the GOP completely botched it when they had majorities last time, I'm thinking RINO might become a complement. As in: "He was elected as a Republican but he caucuses with the conservatives; he's a 'RINO'."
Who is talking about taking checks away from the elderly? Everyone? Really? Link please? I am calling shenanigans on this one.
I agree that if you go back a month or so, the battle could have been fought much better. Boehner and McConnell did not do great or even good. But where we are now, if Pence, Ryan and West have concluded the ‘deal’ is good enough, FOR NOW, I can buy that.
The Repubs folded and gave Obama a pass through the 2012 elections. They lost politically!
If the Senate doesn’t pass it, the the resulting shyutdown is on their head. The GOP should just defeat any increase in the debt ceiling so that they donot become the enablers for the trillion and a half deficits passed by the Dems last term.
Democrats seem especially unhappy. They could have avoided the fight in the first place by raising the debt ceiling in the lame duck session in December, when they had large majorities in both houses of Congress.But Mr. Barone, this cannot be. So many on this forum know politics much better than you, apparently. Mr. Reid is the master negotiator and deal artist. Boehner and McConnell are just dolts with no spine. Your 50 years or so and encyclopedic knowledge of national politics are nothing for this forum. Come over here to freerepublic.com and be educated. </sarcasm>
But they decided not to. Reid's comments then suggested that he expected the issue to split the House Republicans, pitting the leadership against the 87 Tea Party-sympathizing freshmen. The leaders would have to agree to a tax increase in order to get a deal, with a party schism like the one that followed George H.W. Bush's agreement to a tax increase in 1990.
Yahoo, we’re the big winners. We’re only adding 5.1 Trillion to the National Debt instead of 7.4 Trillion.
The deal should not have been “come to an agreement or we are going to cut medicare and the military” the dems win on BOTH of those points.Give me a break. On the one hand you argue that the cuts are not real, but yet at the same time are apocalyptic for granny and the generals. So, which is it? If the cuts are not real significant then managing to take care of granny will be no big deal for the GOP or anyone to accomplish, no?
It remains to be seen what happens when real cuts must occur.
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