John Boehner in Idaho
yesterday:
“I’ve made it clear that we’re not going to increase the debt limit without cuts and reforms that are greater than the increase in the debt limit.
“The president doesn’t think this is fair, thinks I’m being difficult to deal with. But I’ll say this: It may be unfair but what I’m trying to do here is to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would produce if left to its own devices. We’re going to have a whale of a fight.”
As I've been saying, this is pure bull. John Boehner is not going to use the debt limit as leverage to force President Obama and congressional Democrats to accept his plan for cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
In his own words from 2009:
“I think raising the debt limit is the responsible thing to do for our country, the responsible thing for our economy,” Boehner said. “If we were to fail to increase the debt limit, we would send our economy into a tailspin.”
Boehner knows that if Republicans hold the debt limit hostage, they'll get blamed for the tailspin—and he knows that would be even worse for his political career than pissing off a bunch of tea partiers. This is such an obvious reality that earlier this year, when the House faced the need to raise the debt limit,
he said that it was the sequester, not the debt limit, that gave Republicans leverage:
Republican willingness to support the sequester, Mr. Boehner says, is "as much leverage as we're going to get."
Boehner did say that the debt limit was "one point of leverage" but he added that it was "not the ultimate leverage." Nonetheless, he repeated his now-familiar vow to demand spending cuts equal to or greater than the amount of debt limit increase. And then just a few weeks later, he caved, agreeing to raise the debt limit without get anything in return.
Now he says it's the debt limit that gives him leverage, probably because before the debt ceiling comes up, he's first got to prevent a government shutdown. Certainly it's not because he really believes it. He's talking big, and making promises to tea partiers, but they are promises he's made before, and like before, they are promises that he can't keep. The big question about the debt limit isn't whether or not it's going to get raised, it's whether Boehner will be able to convince his party to raise it or if he's going to need Democrats to bail him out—and whether or not he'll be able to keep his job in the aftermath of whatever happens.