How is he swooning? He wrote:
"Yet Boehner was holding a losing hand. Had he added a GOP wish-list bill to the debt ceiling, Harry Reid’s Senate would have rejected it. President Obama would have denounced it as putting at risk the full faith and credit of the United States.
"Big Media would have piled on. The markets would have been rattled. The Dow would have begun to swoon. Corporate America, cash cow of the Republican Party, would have begun to howl.
"A clamor to pass a clean debt ceiling bill or risk a new recession would have arisen. And the House Republicans would have caved, as they finally had to cave on the budget bill last fall."
If I didn't agree with his analysis, I would have linked the roll call votes when they were available after the votes. The pubbies were probably going to lose the PR war. Why lose for nothing?
So what did they win by surrendering?
They lose because they always sell out rather than put up an articulate fight. They are as good as on the same team as the Dems, as evidenced by their actually giving back a chunk of the sequester that they had won, not from putting up a good fight, but because of the Democrats’ miscalculation.
And, of course, they are always duplicitous in what they say and what they end up doing. There is no decent defense of the GOP leadership in the party, the Senate, or the House.