Boehner makes a feeble, desperate play for time


Over the course of this busy day its become clear the Republican government shutdown over Obamacare is profoundly unpopular, plus they’re getting blamed for it, hard. The timing couldn’t have been worse, by the end of this day millions of people will have learned the dreaded Obamacare is simply a website with a bunch of boring healthcare insurance policies. On a hilarious side note, Teaparty Jeremiad’s have lowered their Obamacare threat level from “Worst Nazi death law ever that will destroy the country and end freedom” to “there are … err.. dangerous intermittent site glitches”.

Even time is against them now; the longer this draws out the more likely a debt deal will have to be included. So the House pulled another lame stalling tactic:

NBC News — As the federal government shutdown neared the end of its first business day, the House failed to pass a series of separate bills to restart funding for national parks, veterans’ services and the city of Washington, D.C. The measures, designed to eliminate some of the most unpopular consequences of the ongoing shutdown, required a two-thirds majority vote under the House’s rules. Democrats remained mostly united against the funding bills, which they argued amounted to the GOP’s “cherry-picking” of politically palatable federal spending while ignoring the problems of the larger government funding lapse.

The vote on restoring funding for the Veterans Affairs department was 264-164, with 33 Democrats voting in support. A measure to fund the city of D.C. failed by a similar margin. And a bill to keep national parks and museums open also failed to get the two-thirds majority needed.

Hahaha! They couldn’t even pass these tepid teasers to the Senate, where they would be defeated anyway. The GOP knew this stuff wouldn’t pass the Senate, but they figured they might have a weak trap to spring by claiming the Senate was against wounded warriors or some shit.

Imagine how desperate these clowns must be at this point. They’re losing the PR war three-to-one, hated Obamacare is now up, running, and by all accounts wildly popular already, it is immune to s shutdown, and to top it off the momentum is growing for our side and the effects of a shutdown hasn’t even made much of a mark yet. So with that going against them … they demand they get to pass piecemeal funding for whatever they want, essentially giving themselves a line item budget veto, and they couldn’t even get that sweet-heart wet-dream ledge out of their own teaparty dominated House to bait their own trap.

One rhe reason they couldn’t pass it is because teaparty members want the shutdown. A shutdown that is proving to be political poison for the GOP and a boon to the WH. The only play they have, the only way to get around that obstacle and get this debacle behind them, is to put a clean CR out on the House floor for an up or down vote, where it will pass. It will probably cost Boehner his speaker-ship, but really, the guy might as well be serving out his final two-week notice.

Ted Cruz really fucked the House up bad. He may have united the entire town in one key way: Cruz has to be the most bipartisan hated man in DC right now.

Comments

  1. eigenperson says

    I wonder if the solution to this is for Democrats to make the following concession: In exchange for Boehner pushing through a clean CR and an increase in the debt ceiling sufficient to go through 2014, the Democrats will agree to vote for him (instead of nominating a Democrat) if the nutso wing tries to replace him as speaker before the 2014 election.

  2. Suido says

    @eigenperson:

    That would be political suicide for Boehner, guaranteeing that he’d be challenged in the primary by a massively funded Tea Party kook next year. The speaker doing a deal with democrats in exchange for support against an intra-party challenge? Rightwingnuts would spontaneously combust.

    There’s no easy way out of this for the Republican party and Boehner in particular. If there weren’t salaries on the line, I’d be enjoying it immensely.

  3. Reginald Selkirk says

    The timing couldn’t have been worse

    It could have been the day before election day, and I wish it was.
    .
    This is very bad for the Tea party. Recall that a prominent feature of the authoritarian psychology is an inability to admit to ever being wrong.

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