Plenty of warning for these guys to send their white flags of surrender off to the cleaners.
It's never an exact science to predict when we'll hit the debt limit, but the Treasury Department's new estimate is that Congress will need to raise it by the middle of October.
In other words, here we go again:
Republicans are demanding significant new spending cuts in exchange for increasing the nation’s $16.7 trillion debt limit, with some GOP lawmakers insisting on a delay or the scrapping of President Obama’s signature health-care law.
Obama, meanwhile, says he will not negotiate on the debt limit, the government’s legal cap on borrowing.
With the two sides far apart, there is no clear path to resolving the differences. Not raising the limit would ultimately lead to a default, undermining the nation’s credit.
The Obama administration on Monday did not indicate the date that such a default might occur. Rather, it said that it expects to have only $50 billion in cash on hand in mid-October, with no ability to borrow more.
As I've been saying for some time now, I'm convinced that Republicans are bluffing, and that even if they aren't, President Obama will have options to mitigate the damage that they inflict. He won't acknowledge those options as legitimate, however, both because he won't want his position to be the center of the debate and also because he doesn't want Republicans to feel like they can skip out on their responsibilities.
Nonetheless, the mere fact that there is even a question about the debt limit is anxiety provoking. Hardline House Republicans are having an impossible time coming to grips with the fact that President Obama won reelection and that Obamacare is here to stay—and their leadership has yet to figure out a way to get them to support anything approaching a realistic plan to avert shutdown or default.
Despite that drama, it's useful to remember that there are still nearly 200 House Democrats. Even if 90 percent of House Republicans decided to carry out their sabotage threats, there would still be enough votes in the House to prevent disaster.
Obviously, relying on Democrats to get their job done would expose House Republicans as fundamentally useless at the same time as it ripped the GOP apart, so it's a scenario that House Speaker John Boehner wants to avoid at all costs. But the key thing is that when he talks about trying to come up with a "majority of the majority" solution, he's not pursuing legislation that he thinks is best for the country: He's pursuing legislation that he thinks is best for his own political future. He'll certainly pretend that he's trying to wield his leverage, but what he'll really be doing is trying to save his own job. That's not an exercise of power—it's a demonstration of weakness.