Poor Johnny Boo-Boo
House Speaker Ted Cruz lapdog John Boehner concedes the obvious:
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, acknowledged Wednesday that he would allow a vote in the House on a newly-minted Senate deal on debt and spending.
"We fought the good fight. We just didn't win," he said on WLW radio in Ohio.
Boehner additionally confirmed that he would "absolutely" allow the whole House to vote on a plan introduced on Wednesday in the Senate. That bipartisan plan, unveiled by Senate leaders, would fund the government through mid-January and raise the debt ceiling until early February.
Separately, Boehner
released a statement in which he acknowledged that he didn't believe the debt ceiling was actually the point of leverage that Republicans had claimed it to be (my emphasis):
“The House has fought with everything it has to convince the president of the United States to engage in bipartisan negotiations aimed at addressing our country's debt and providing fairness for the American people under ObamaCare. That fight will continue. But blocking the bipartisan agreement reached today by the members of the Senate will not be a tactic for us. In addition to the risk of default, doing so would open the door for the Democratic majority in Washington to raise taxes again on the American people and undo the spending caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act without replacing them with better spending cuts. With our nation's economy still struggling under years of the president's policies, raising taxes is not a viable option. Our drive to stop the train wreck that is the president's health care law will continue. We will rely on aggressive oversight that highlights the law's massive flaws and smart, targeted strikes that split the legislative coalition the president has relied upon to force his health care law on the American people.”
Obviously, Republicans these days aren't encumbered by things like logic or memory, so it's always possible that the next time the debt limit comes up (which will probably by in late summer 2014 thanks to extraordinary measures), they will once again put up a fight. But if they do, there's no reason to take them seriously, because time and again, Boehner's actions have made it clear that he is unwilling to force default. (Side note: That's probably the best thing you can say about him in this entire mess, which is pretty pathetic.)
One thing that I didn't see in Boehner's statement was any explicit acknowledgment that shutting down the government is a bad idea. That might just be to defend the GOP's actions this time around, but it also could be that he wants to reserve the option to force another shutdown in January without having a statement from just a couple of months earlier thrown in his face. It won't be long before we find out.