This sequence of events from Friday night puts the lie to Speaker Boehner’s assertion that it was Pres. Obama, not Boehner, who shut down negotiations on the debt ceiling crisis:
“It’s the president who walked away from his agreement and demanded more money at the last minute,” [Boehner said, during the news conference he called around 7:15 Friday night.]
The speaker has said that he needs a bill in hand by Monday to ensure House action by midweek and still leave enough time for the Senate to act before the Treasury runs out of money. Prior to the breakup, discussions were already underway among Senate leaders Friday about how to proceed with a fallback, and there has been speculation of a four to six week extension to get past the immediate crisis.
But this short term approach faced united Democratic opposition after the collapse, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying flatly Friday night that it would be “unacceptable.”
“The deal was never reached, and was never really close,” the speaker wrote in a letter to House members released at 6 p.m. — after the financial markets had closed. “In the end we couldn’t connect. Not because of different personalities but because of different visions for our country.”
Jonathan Chait reacts:
It seems hard to square Boehner’s claim that Obama walked away from his agreement and that no agreement ever existed. It’s possible that Obama altered his offer, asking for more revenue in return for higher entitlement cuts. But if they didn’t have a deal, then Obama couldn’t have walked away from it.
Indeed, Boehner’s spin seems like an attempt to walk the awkward line between portraying himself to the general public as willing to compromise, and convincing conservatives that he never compromised
This is prime fodder for Rachel Maddow’s ongoing series of reports titled, “John Boehner Is Bad at His Job.” On the bright side, however, at least Boehner did not cry.
In fact, this is little more than chicanery inside a bamboozle. There would be no debt ceiling crisis if Republicans simply agreed to handle the issue the way the party in opposition has handled it the past 70-odd times the debt ceiling has been raised — in an up or down vote on a clean bill that simply says, “The debt ceiling of the United States shall be raised.”
The Republicans’ decision to use the debt ceiling — which represents nothing less than the full faith and credit of the United States’ financial system — to extort concessions from the president and the Democrats on spending and deficit reduction was, to put it as mildly as possible, inappropriate.
