You know the GOP is ridiculous.
They discovered the deficit they created on the day President Obama was inaugurated. They ran against Medicare reforms that they then adopted in their budget. They shut down the government then demanded negotiations they rejected 19 times. They spent much of the this useless government shutdown yelling at people for things they shut down being shut down.
This is not sane behavior. It’s also not working. More than 70% of the public rejects the way Republicans are negotiating.
Still, we’re about 24 hours from a global financial catastrophe for one reason: the Republican Party has become the Tea Party and the Tea Party can’t pass anything that makes sense.
They can pass dozens of Obamacare repeals, defund ACORN over and over and even pass the toughest abortion restrictions in generations. But they can’t even pass their own budget appropriations because the sequester — which they alternately blame on Obama and claim as their greatest policy success of the decade — demands unrealistic cuts that members cannot sell to their districts.
When Speaker Boehner couldn’t find 218 votes for a compromise that that would reopen the government and raise the debt limit, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. He doesn’t have 218 Republican votes for any compromise and his occasional willingness to pass bills with Democratic votes is going to eventually cost him his job, which he seems quite attached to.
House Republicans, like President Obama, won election in 2012. Unlike the president, they didn’t win the popular vote. Their job isn’t to appeal to swing voters in Ohio. Their job is to appeal to GOP primary voters who are now mostly Tea Partiers and evangelicals. And Tea Partiers and evangelicals believe that only reason we still have a welfare state, Roe v. Wade and Obamacare is that GOP leaders have compromised too much. This has made the regular activity of keeping the government open and funded a treasonous appeasement.
You know the GOP is ridiculous. And Wall Street knows this. They haven’t yet taken this debt limit crisis anywhere as seriously as the last one, which wiped out 2,000 points from the Dow before it was over. Of course, trusting Wall Street’s judgement is how we got our financial crisis.
Speaker Boehner didn’t want this fight but knew he had no choice but to fight it. He had to fail and be seen enduring great public torture doing it before he thought he could be seen actually trying to prevent a financial catastrophe. We know he’s putting on a show to hide the fact that he knows he has to govern/compromise. And it could cost him his job.
The Washington Examiner‘s Justin Green believes the whole point of the “Defund Obamacare” scam was to flush out the GOP leadership.
I wanted the Republicans to shut down the government to draw attention to their insanity before the actually defaulted on our debt. But here we are on the verge of default and Tea Partiers are being chastened, which will only make them eager for another fight.
The only thing that may save us this time was that deep down the current House GOP leadership seems willing to disappoint its base, when absolutely necessary. Next time, we may not be so lucky.
