Robert Costa:
“It’s all over. We’ll take the Senate deal,” says a senior GOP aide. Senator Mitch McConnell’s office quickly noted to reporters that the Kentucky Republican would be taking back the lead.
A key moment in the fight came when Heritage Action announced it was “key voting” against the bill. Support was already flagging, and the decision made up the minds of many members sitting on the fence.
“People are thinking about primaries, they really are,” says a GOP chief of staff.
The above is a recounting of how the House couldn't pass anything yesterday. And while Boehner's still the Speaker because no one else wants the job, does anyone doubt how awful he is at it? In any case, Pickett's Charge failed again.
WaPo:
Glenn Greenwald, the blogger and journalist who has revealed key details about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program, is leaving Britain’s Guardian newspaper to join a new news venture backed by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.
The new, as-yet-unnamed news site has also sought to hire Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who was instrumental in linking former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to Greenwald and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, and national security reporter Jeremy Scahill of the Nation magazine, said a person familiar with the venture. Snowden, now in temporary exile in Russia, supplied the journalists with classified material detailing the extent of the NSA’s monitoring of electronic communications in the United States and abroad and cooperation by British agencies.
UPDATE from
Greg Sargent:
The Morning Plum: John Boehner’s `moment of truth’ arrives
More politics and policy below the fold.
David Firestone on what this was really about:
For the sake of the rest of his presidency, and the presidents to come, he has to make it clear that no chamber of Congress can back the White House into a corner by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States. Even a small concession, like ending the Congressional subsidies, would betray that principle.
Of course that position is irreconcilable with the hard-right faction of the House that sees the debt ceiling as the only leverage that can turn them into a real political force. But the unprecedented use of that leverage has to be stopped here, even at a terrible cost, because the long-term cost would be so much worse.
TIME:
In another era, for a different leader, it would have been a stunning rebuke. For John Boehner, it was just another embarrassing stumble in a speakership studded with them.
House Republican leaders canceled a planned Tuesday night vote on a Boehner-backed proposal to resolve the debt and budget crises hanging over the U.S., but the dramatic news was met with shrugs and snorts. Facing a critical test, having brought the nation to the brink of default, the nation’s top Republican failed to rustle up the votes once again—and the humiliation took nobody by surprise.
Swampland: "Process, ugly & messy & infuriating, ultimately works"
http://t.co/... Tell it to the millions who've been hurt, assholes
— @billmon1
WaPo:
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) started Tuesday with a last-ditch attempt to exert control over his restive caucus, proposing a new plan to open the government and raise the debt ceiling in an effort to give Republicans a bit of leverage.
But as evening fell over the Capitol, it was increasingly clear who had control over the House GOP: no one.
Lindsey Graham, via
TPM:
"We won't be the last political party to overplay our hand," he said. "It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up. But their response is making things worse, not better."
Harold Meyerson:
Like the Stalinists and the Jacobins, today’s tea party zealots have purified their movement — not by executing but by driving away those Republicans who don’t share their enthusiasm for wrecking their country if they can’t compel the majority to embrace their notions. Today, there are fewer but “better” Republicans — if “better” means adhering to the tea party view that a United States not adhering to tea party values deserves to be brought to a clangorous halt. NBC News-Wall Street Journal polling last week turned up a bare 24 percent of Americans who have a favorable impression of the Republican Party — a share almost as low as the 21 percent who have a favorable impression of the tea party...
Today’s tea party-ized Republicans speak less for Wall Street or Main Street than they do for the seething resentments of white Southern backwaters and their geographically widespread but ideologically uniform ilk. Their theory of government, to the extent that they have one, derives from John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification — that states in general and white minorities in particular should have the right to overturn federal law and impede majority rule. Like their predecessors in the Jim Crow South, today’s Republicans favor restricting minority voting rights if that is necessary to ensure victory at the polls.
And btw, false equivalence has aided and abetted the rise of the
John Birch Society aka the Republican House.