Greg Sargent does a brief rundown of
where the debt ceiling fight goes from here:
Here’s the game plan, as seen by Senate Dem aides: The next move is to sit tight and wait for the House to vote on Boehner's proposal. The idea is that with mounting conservative opposition, it could very well be defeated. If the Boehner plan goes down in the House, that would represent a serious blow to Boehner’s leadership, weakening his hand in negotiations. [...]
The second alternative possibility being gamed out by Senate Dems would take place if the Boehner plan does manage to sneak through the House. Aides say Dems would then vote it down in the Senate. And here’s where it gets even more interesting.
Senate Dem aides say they would then use Boehner’s bill — which passed the House but died in the Senate — to expedidate their own proposal. Here’s how. They would use the “shell” of the Boehner bill as a vehicle to pass Harry Reid’s proposal, because for various procedural reasons House messages get expedited consideration. [...] After that, Reid’s proposal — having passed the Senate — would then get kicked back to the House. Having proved that Boehner’s plan can’t pass the Senate, Democrats would in effect be giving House Republicans a choice: Either pass the Reid proposal, or take the blame for default and the economic calamity that ensues.
So, yeah, those are the two options. Boehner's plan or Reid's plan.
But here's the thing: if Boehner can't round up support for his own plan, I don't see how he manages to round up support for anything else, either. And Boehner is having a heck of a time getting that support already.
Boehner's plan isn't going to pass the Senate; that's pretty much a given. And anything that does pass the Senate is going to be seen as a further compromise on the Boehner plan, leading to a revolt (if such a word even makes sense, given that Boehner doesn't have control of his caucus now) and a dead bill in the House.
So both bills still lead to stalemate. There's no current "game plan" that will result in either of them getting passed. Anything that gets passed by the Senate is going to be a further "compromise" on one or the other, and anything that's even the slightest bit more "compromised" than Boehner's current probably-already-doomed-anyway plan is going to be voted down by the same brigade of House crackpots who dragged everyone into this mess in the first place.
So what happens, here? The House isn't listening to public opinion or Wall Street types telling them to get their act together, and I don't see how they suddenly start listening before Aug. 2. Shutdown seems, at this point, inevitable. The tea partiers seem to actively want it as a raw display of their own power, as a display of their own antipathy toward government in general, and as assertion that they, and not the president of the United States, is in charge around here (for evidence of that last point, see the peacockish behavior of Eric Cantor, who has continually fouled negotiations all by himself.)
With things in the House so thoroughly dysfunctional, it seems about time to start asking the less comfortable question: how long such a shutdown might last. The Treasury may have enough spare funds to keep things open for perhaps up to a week; after that, about 40 percent of federal spending would be unceremoniously terminated. Needless to say, that would be a catastrophic injury to the current economy. How long would the House teabaggers hold out, and what would the crowds outside their home offices look like if they tried?
It is certainly possible that it could be Obama or the Senate Democrats who will cave. The most likely cave on their part would be to accept a short-term bill, with or without strings, but when dealing with the caucus equivalent of an unintelligible gun-toting maniac, who knows how much caving they're willing to do. And that's Boehner's only remaining hope, at this point: that he'll somehow get bailed out on all this by a panicking White House or Senate Democrats. The White House's own best hope is probably that the non-teabagger elements of the Republican Party, faced with an economy teetering on the edge of utter chaos, eventually tell their own intransigent members to go jump off a bridge and cobble a clean bill together to be passed with Democratic support, but again, I'm not sure Boehner can muster any meaningful support for that, now or in the next week or two.
Boehner's caucus is in such severe disarray that my own suspicion is that the House teabaggers won't be able to pass anything even slightly "compromising," short term or long term or anywhere in between, until long after Aug. 2 comes and goes. The chasm between what they can accept and what everyone else involved can accept is simply too great.