The Other McCain

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House Will Vote Today on Revamped Debt-Ceiling Bill; Senate Dems Say ‘No’

Posted on | July 28, 2011 | 27 Comments

Despite the fact that 53 Senate Democrats have signed a letter vowing to vote against it, John Boehner is pushing ahead to bring his budget bill to a vote today in the House of Representatives:

The new measure depends on caps on agency budgets to cut more than $900 billion from the deficit over the coming decade while permitting a commensurate increase in the nation’s borrowing to allow the government to pay its bills.
Boehner acknowledged that the measure was hardly perfect but represented “the best opportunity we have to hold the president’s feet to the fire. He wants a $2.4 trillion blank check that lets him continue his spending binge through the next election. This is the time to say no.” Boehner made the comments Wednesday to conservative radio host Laura Ingraham.

The vote won’t come until late this afternoon — they don’t want to risk scaring Wall Street with a failed vote before the markets close — and Boehner is expected to have to do some serious arm-twisting to get the 218 votes needed to pass the bill in the House. Jim Antle at The American Spectator lays out Boehner’s problems with his own caucus:

Bamboozled time and again by Democratic presidents and their own leadership, many rank-and-file conservatives . . . are unwilling to raise either taxes or the federal debt limit in exchange for phantom spending cuts.
Late Wednesday, there were signs that the speaker was quelling this conservative rebellion. Boehner revised the plan to include $22 billion in deficit reduction in the first year and to cut and cap spending by an amount that exceeds the debt ceiling increase by $17 billion, according to the updated CBO score circulated by the speaker’s press office. “Get your ass in line,” Boehner reportedly told wavering members.
They may be complying. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who has at times seemed to be positioning himself to Boehner’s right in the debt ceiling debate, pronounced himself “150 percent” in the speaker’s corner. According to press reports, Cantor exhorted members to quit their “whining” and vote for the Boehner plan. “The debt limit vote sucks,” Cantor is said to have admitted, but it was time to “call the president’s bluff” by passing spending cuts and a short-term debt ceiling hike.

Molly Hooper of The Hill reports:

Thursday’s vote on the House Republican debt-limit bill has quickly become a referendum on Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
It is, without question, the biggest vote of Boehner’s reign. Some are even speculating that Boehner’s Speakership is on the line.

Of course, any bill acceptable to 218 House Republicans may be impossible to get approved by Harry Reid’s Democrat majority in the Senate. All 53 Senate Democrats signed a letter to Boehner yesterday, saying the House GOP’s bill is not “responsible” and “will do America more harm than good.” Allahpundit at Hot Air comments:

So that’s how this story ends. With the party of endless spending and entitlements unto death lecturing fiscal conservatives on how they’re leading the country into a credit downgrade. Perfecto.

Harry Reid has his own plan, but hasn’t brought it to the Senate floor yet and, as Alison Acosta Frazier of Heritage explains, Reid’s plan hands Obama an immediate $2.75 trillion blank check in return for . . . uh, not much. Never mind the CBO scoring. Reid’s proposal employs a typical D.C. budget gimmick: “We’re going to cut X, Y and Z in year 7, 8 and 9 of this 10-year plan — and you can trust us to keep our promises, right?”

Yeah, Mom, I promise I’m gonna eat that broccoli casserole tomorrow. Now can I have some ice cream?

But this is all hypothetical anyway, because even if a compromise can be worked out between the House and Senate — and the Senate has so far passed absolutely nothing — Obama has promised a veto.

So expect a lot of hooplah on the cable-news networks, making the grand kabuki dance seem like a world-historic event, but passing the Boehner plan in the House will really be just the first tiny step toward bringing this mess to a conclusion.

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Category: Budget, Congress, John Boehner

Comments

  • Anonymous

    So that’s how this story ends. With the party of endless spending and
    entitlements unto death lecturing fiscal conservatives on how they’re
    leading the country into a credit downgrade. Perfecto.

    Brilliant summary.

  • Anonymous

    Senate Dems are posturing.  If the bill passes the House today, the responsible thing for conservatives to do is to raise holy hell with the 20 or so donkey Senators up for re-election in 2012.  So it passes the Senate and goes to Barry’s desk so the debacle is forever etched in history as his and his alone.

    d(^_^)bhttp://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/”Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

  • Anonymous

    Senate Dems are posturing.  If the bill passes the House today, the responsible thing for conservatives to do is to raise holy hell with the 20 or so donkey Senators up for re-election in 2012.  So it passes the Senate and goes to Barry’s desk so the debacle is forever etched in history as his and his alone.

    d(^_^)bhttp://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/”Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

  • Anonymous

    Senate Dems are posturing.  If the bill passes the House today, the responsible thing for conservatives to do is to raise holy hell with the 20 or so donkey Senators up for re-election in 2012.  So it passes the Senate and goes to Barry’s desk so the debacle is forever etched in history as his and his alone.

    d(^_^)bhttp://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/”Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

  • Anonymous

    Democrat/progressive projection in full technicolor: warning that Boehner’s bill “will do America more harm than good.”

    That’s rich, coming from the party/movement that’s spent the last 80+ years introducing ever new “fixes,” one batch of unintended consequences piled on top of another, without ever going back and seriously accounting for the net results of their “investments.”

    Of course, when other parties try to audit the Democrat/progressive “fixes,” the programs are then well entrenched, with the benefits applied strategically and the costs spread around diffusely.

    You tell ‘em, “yeah, that program provides some benefits . . .  after all, we’re spending X-billions a year on it. If it didn’t provide any benefits, that would be straight extortion. But it DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD.”

    They respond by demagoguing the ”benefits” of the program.   

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Linked to at:
    It’s Novena Time!

  • Pingback: The American Steering Wheel Is Broken « Blog de KingShamus

  • http://twitter.com/marriedrambler Andrew Patrick

    The magic money fairy has gotten very unreliable of late.

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    No matter which side wins this ignorance, we all lose. That’s another thing that pisses me off about this shit. You listen to Fox long enough you’d think the only thing of importance is which side the American people blame the most. Screw ‘em all, I’m ready to vote the lot of them out, both sides.

  • Anonymous

    Why is Boehner so hot to trot to pass a craptastic bill that he already knows is doomed to failure in the Senate?

    If the Senate is just going to vote it down, why not just pass Cut Cap & Balance again?  At least that’s a good bill and not a heaping pile of smeg.
     

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    Both sides are trying to wreck the country and then try to play the blame game. All either side deserves to win is a great big kick in the ass and that might be just what they get. If they go through with this, look for Donald Trump to renew his campaign, probably as an independent. I’m not so sure I won’t support him.

  • Anonymous

     That’s exactly the kind of defeatist mentality that doesn’t help at all.  How is the House supposed to get anything accomplished when the Senate refuses to consider anything the House passes?  Whose fault is that?  And if you say ‘both sides’, I’ll kick you in the knee.

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    Well I better get my knee-pads on, but yeah, its both sides. Its easy for those assholes to fall back on principle, they won’t suffer the consequences. Don’t think for one minute Michelle Bachmann is going to be living on pinto beans for the next two or three years if things go to hell.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    Call the bluff.

    Boehner 2.0 is still weak, but better that 1.0 was.  I still hate the “bipartisan congressional committee,” but if they won’t make real cuts, we can use that against them.  Passing CC&B again is meaningless since it has already failed in the Senate.  Now we will pass the less restrictive bill that can get through the House.  Let’s see what the Senate really does.

    If they do block it, Boehner just has to say, we gave you a budget, CC&B, and Boehner 2.0 and you won’t pass anything.  Your turn to pass a plan for us to turn down, then.

    People like McCaskill, Ben Nelson, and Jon Tester will be killing their reelection hopes if they vote against it.   Make them do it.

  • Anonymous

    Stop your whining, it just makes you look like a doofus.  Please explain to me why I’m wrong for putting the blame squarely where it belongs, on the Senate, which has voted down everything sent to it and hasn’t passed a damn thing of its own.  Oh, and hasn’t passed a budget in over 2 years, and the last one that was passed was over 5 months late.

    Forget the kneepads, you need a thinking cap.

  • Anonymous

     58 Senators have already said they will vote against Boehner 2.0; that’s already more than voted against CC&B.  What’s the point in passing a weaker plan that will get more opposition?

  • Joe

    Boehner’s plan sucks.  But the Dems might be stupid enough to block it anyway. 

  • Joe

    I would go back and try to get CC&B through again and said the Dems are refusing because they hate America! 

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    Stop that shooting at the messenger. I’m just telling you how it is, how it’s going down, and how its going to look. Bottom line. its all their faults. Its Obama’s fault number one, but its also the Senate and the Houses fault. Nobody looks good in this and they are all only going to look worse when its all over with. But Obama is the one with the bully pulpit, and a compliant media on his side, White House press corps be damned. The House GOP is acting like they already hold the White House and Senate. They better come up for air.

  • Anonymous

    Remember that in the mid-1990s, the GOP passed Welfare Reform three times. Bill Clinton vetoed it the first two times. It wasn’t until July 1996 — with his own re-election staring him in the face — that he signed the third bill, claiming that it was somehow significantly different that the two bills he’d vetoed. It wasn’t, and the liberals hated him for signing it, but he knew full well what would happen if he gave the GOP an excuse to run TV attack ads: “Vetoed Welfare Reform THREE TIMES …”

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    The problem with that comparison is the election is still a year and a half away. DEFAULT, and losing our credit rating (something Clinton was never faced with) is less than a week away.

  • Anonymous

     There will be no debt default; the US Treasury has said as much already.  You’re misinformed or biased, and I don’t really care which.

  • Joe

    All I can say about the GOP in this:  DISAPPOINTED!

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    You’re probably right about the default, but what about the credit rating. There’s more involved here than just making it harder to borrow. Our interest payment will be higher than what we’re already paying, which I think is something like about 28 billion a month. How much more will we be paying a month over this nonsense? And biased? You’re damned right I’m biased, on the side of reality. You assume everybody that’s not a Democrat or a RINO thinks like the Tea Party. They don’t.

  • Anonymous

     I would reply to ThePaganTemple, but the reply button on his post is off the right edge and thus unclickable.

    In my experience, people who push memes like ‘biased in favor of reality’ are most often liberal trolls who are in fact about as far away from reality as one can get.  See the whole ‘reality-based community’ family of snark, pretty much all of it from people to the left of Fidel Castro.

  • Anonymous

    You know, I’m not thrilled with the bill, but it’s time to:
    A) pass the bill.
    B) go on the “feelings” attack.
    B should be something along the lines of Boehner going to the microphone and saying ” Well, we’ve passed a budget and taken two hard shots at producing a plan that will allow us to raise the debt limit without endangering America’s credit rating.  We’re pleased that the President has taken time away from his golf game and joined along with his compatriots in the Senate to squeeze plenty of finger waving time into their busy 4-1/2 day schedules.  But now it’s time to ante up.  If our modest (and believe me, we know just how damn modest it is) plan is ‘too far outside the mainstream’ for the President and his fellow Democrats, it’s time for them to put a plan on the table.  They have our fax number, we’ll be waiting.”

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    I would reply to Finrod, but in my experience its a waste of time to talk to people who accuse you of being biased just because you disagree with their point of of view. People who take that line tend to be leftist trolls, although sometimes they can be right-wing ideologues who are no more familiar with reality than their leftist counterparts. Otherwise they wouldn’t assume the worst about people who disagree with them on any given issue.

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