The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait suggests that in the Republicans’ gambit of economic terrorism over the debt ceiling — their proposal to Democrats was essentially: kill Medicare and Social Security or we will drive the world economy off a cliff — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed yesterday “to let hostages go”:
Yesterday morning, Mitch McConnell gave away a key tell when he said he had a contingency plan to ensure the debt ceiling gets lifted. Today he showed his hand and it’s a fold. The plan announced by McConnell today is highly, and intentionally, convoluted, but the details don’t really matter. The essence of it is to abandon efforts to force policy concessions in return for lifting the debt ceiling, and instead set up a bunch of show votes to embarrass the Democrats. In other words, it’s a reversion to the old status quo, before President Obama and the Congressional Republicans turned the debt ceiling vote into a high stakes hostage crisis.
We don’t know how this gambit will turn out. John Boehner’s spokesman is definitely not ruling it out. At the very least, McConnell’s capitulation will pressure House Republicans into going along. They may refuse. But assuming this winds up being the mechanism to increase the debt ceiling, it’s a staggering turnaround.
If you told me last week that we might get a debt ceiling hike without Obama making policy concessions to Republicans, I wouldn’t have believed you. What happened since then? Well, Obama called the Republicans’ bluff.
Lawrence O’Donnell had a similar take on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” last night, as did Rachel Maddow on her show, filing this sorry episode in her ongoing series, “John Boehner Is Bad at His Job.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi also apparently believes the Republicans folded. Even with the tire tracks still fresh on her back after being tossed under the bus by the president, along with the entire House Democratic caucus, she had nothing but praise for him:
“I couldn’t be prouder of his leadership,” Pelosi said during a press conference Tuesday. “I think this administration has done more to listen to members of Congress in a bipartisan way than anything I have seen before.”
The Minority Leader favorably compared Obama’s presence in the negotiations to former President George W. Bush, recounting a White House meeting she had shortly after the 2006 midterm elections, wherein Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress.
“President Bush came into the meeting, didn’t sit down, said hello and before he said goodbye, he said ‘this is my package, take it or leave it,’” Pelosi said. “There is a vast difference there. This President has been open and willing.”
Of course, as Boehner and McConnell surely know, the president was also bluffing. Democrats in the House were never going to vote for cuts to Social Security and Medicare under these circumstances.
Had the Obama-Boehner entitlement-cuts-in-return-for-tax-hikes deal gone through, Boehner would have never gotten his tea bagger caucus to go along with and so would have been required to hobble together a coalition of non-tea bagger Republicans and conserva-Dems — a whip count that would appear on its face to fall well short of the 218 votes required to pass a bill.
