Visual Source: Newseum
WaPo:
Republicans have delayed a vote on their bill as they scramble Tuesday night to rewrite portions of the measure to ensure that accompanying spending cuts are large enough, according to three senior GOP aides.
I hope you slept well, Mr. Speaker. Blowing up the economy is happening on your watch. That you've lost control of your caucus is nearly unprecedented. That Democrats have to literally save the country from Republican idiocy is arguably not (see Nixon.) So, who knew? We did. As it happens, every damn thing we've said about the GOP House (from being extremist to unable to govern) is turning out to be demonstrably true, but
understated.
Eugene Robinson:
Just for a moment, let’s think the unthinkable: What if we get to August 2 and there’s still no deal to raise the debt ceiling? How big a disaster would that be?
Somewhere between massive and apocalyptic, if an actual default were to ensue. That’s why I’ve never understood, throughout this whole endless tragicomic melodrama, how President Obama could possibly let that happen. It seems to me that definitive action — unilateral, if necessary — to prevent the nation from suffering obvious, imminent, grievous harm is one of the duties any president must perform. Perhaps the most important duty.
David P. Barash:
Despite all the bluster about an impending default on the government’s debt, most observers in Washington and on Wall Street still believe the two parties will reach a crisis-averting agreement.
That’s because the practice of American politics assumes that all players will negotiate according to predictable patterns — that they will realize they can get more from compromise than by demanding everything and winning nothing.
Under that assumption, President Obama is right to keep pressing for a compromise, because eventually the Republicans will fall in line. But as two wildly different fields — game theory and the study of elephant mating patterns — show, there are limits to the usual assumptions: sometimes players simply refuse to play the game, and when that happens, the best advice for their opponents is to do the same.
Jim Galloway:
The spectacle of a House speaker unable to rally members of his own caucus doesn’t happen every day – regardless of who’s in charge. In a chat this afternoon, Buddy Darden, an Atlanta attorney and former Democratic congressman, made this point:
“The responsibility of being the ruling party, or the party in charge, is that you’re responsible for a positive outcome. This, in my mind, is unprecedented – that the speaker can’t get a majority of his own caucus to step up. There are enough Democratic votes if he can get a majority of his own caucus to pass it.
“But personally, it looks to me like [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor is undermining the speaker….The speaker has apparently lost control of his caucus – which I’ve never seen.”
“I was there with three speakers – with Tip [O’Neill], Jim Wright and Tom Foley, the weakest of whom was Tom Foley. But still, there was a certain recognition that when the time came, you did what you had to do. Some of us, at different times, didn’t always go along with the caucus. But we realized that there were certain times – when it came to the speaker, when it came to the rules, when it came to the overall operation of the body – that you had to step up.”
CNN:
House Speaker John Boehner is in a tough position: between a rock and a hard place, wedged squarely into a corner.
On one side, he has President Obama painting him as a stubborn teenager who is unwilling to meet halfway on the debt ceiling.
On the other side, he has the small but powerful tea party freshman class in the House, many of whom are unapologetic in their desire not to give an inch on tax increases and are quite willing to push the negotiations to -- and possibly over -- the edge.
Ezra Klein:
Whenever I try to run out the logic of Obama simply refusing to allow Republicans to take the debt ceiling hostage, I end up with us approximately where we are now, but Obama’s numbers are lower, the GOP’s numbers are higher, a number of congressional Democrats have broken ranks, and Washington elites are firmly arrayed against the White House. It’s not a line of reasoning that leads to a better outcome for Democrats.
This issue is playing out essentially as you would expect given the basic power imbalance at its heart: Many elected members of the GOP really are willing to let Treasury exhaust its borrowing authority. Very few elected Democrats can say the same. For that reason, Republicans always had the leverage on this issue, and in that world, Democrats could never have credibly refused to deal. You can ask whether Obama should have offered as much as he has, but I think that’s a more marginal question given that the GOP has rejected everything he’s proposed.
But what Democrats did wrong, Ezra goes on to say, is not raise the debt ceiling when they were in charge, and supposes they should have anticipated losing in 2010 and letting the inmates run the asylum. Well, there's no question this sucks, but could we really have known all that then?
Reid Wilson:
House Speaker John Boehner's proposal to raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion in exchange for $1.2 trillion in cuts has achieved what Democrats have spent months trying to do: It has divided Republican interest groups that have so far stood united.
National Journal:
Does the Democratic argument that George W. Bush's policies are responsible for the nation's economic plight still have legs, more than two years after he left office? According to the latest CNN/ORC and ABC News/Washington Post surveys, the answer is yes.
When asked whether the policies of President Obama and the Democrats or Bush and the Republicans are more responsible for the country's current economic problems, 57 percent said Bush and the Republicans are more responsible, according to the CNN/ORC poll, while just 29 percent said Obama and the Democrats are more responsible. 10 percent said both are responsible while three percent indicated they find neither to be culpable.
What's more, the percentage that find Bush and the Republicans more responsible has jumped from the CNN/ORC poll conducted in September of 2010, less than a year after Bush left office. Then, 53 percent said Bush and the Republicans were more responsible while 33 percent said Obama and the Democrats were responsible.