Greg Sargent:
Some eighty House Republicans have now signed a letter calling on GOP leaders not to even let the McConnell plan get to the floor for a vote, a GOP aide tells me.
As I noted here yesterday, one key metric for judging whether the McConnell plan can get through the House is a letter that Tea Party-backed Rep. Joe Walsh is distributing among colleagues. He’s hoping to amass 100 members on the letter, which would be a strong statement of opposition that would call into question whether the McConnell plan has any chance of passing.
The GOP aide tells me he’s roughly 20 signatures away from that goal. The letter with final signatories wil be released tonight.
Yesterday evening, Walsh delayed releasing his letter, saying he had close to 90 signatures, but that he hadn't yet hit his target of 100. He says he'll release it today, and his obvious goal is to prove that a "Plan B" scenario for raising the debt limit can't pass the House. But whether or not he gets his 100 signatures, the only thing the letter will really prove is that John Boehner is going to need a ton of Democratic votes to raise the debt limit.
Here's why: House Republicans have ruled out voting for any debt deal that raises revenue. Unless they flip-flop, that takes the possibility of a "Big Deal" off the table, leaving a "Plan B" scenario as the only path for raising the debt ceiling. And with this letter, 100 or so House Republicans will have come out against that scenario; for them, it's their way or the highway. And their way has no chance of getting through the Senate or securing President Obama's signature, so raising the debt limit will need to be done without their votes.
That leaves us with some simple math: there are currently 432 members of the House (with three vacancies), so you need 217 votes to pass a bill. There are 239 Republicans, so if between 90 and 100 of them have ruled out supporting a "Plan B," Boehner's best case scenario is getting about 140 or 150 votes from his conference. That will leave him in the range of 70 to 80 votes shy of raising the debt limit.
Obviously, those 70 to 80 votes must come from Democrats. In April, 81 of them voted for the budget deal compromise with President Obama, but House Democrats are going to be less eager to vote to raise the debt limit than they were to pass a funding bill, irrational though that may be. So if you're trying to figure our whether John Boehner is going to be able to pass legislation raising the debt limit, the first two questions to ask are how many Republican votes he can deliver, and what will Democrats who vote to raise the debt limit demand in return for their votes?
Undoubtedly, some of those Democrats will (stupidly) demand spending cuts, albeit less than Republicans would like. But if Boehner keeps on losing Republicans, there's going to come a tipping point where loading up the debt limit vote with spending cuts will make it increasingly difficult to win Democratic votes to pass it, because there's only so many Blue Dogs out there who actually want to cut spending. At the same time, he'll risk losing Republican and even some Blue Dog votes if he reduces the level cuts. If and when we reach that point, the question will be whether he is able to deliver votes from members who may be unhappy with the level of spending cuts (whether they think the cuts are too much or too little). If he can't, the debt limit won't be raised.
That might be a bit of a nightmare scenario (at least from his perspective), but it's exactly what happened with the first TARP vote. If he wants to prevent it from happening again, Boehner needs to get a grip on his caucus. And fast.
8:03 AM PT: Nancy Pelosi in her weekly briefing just now described what she's looking for in the debt ceiling bill: It "must reduce our deficit. Must make cuts [...] strive for revenue. Create Growth."
