American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

forgive my ignorance on procedural stuff, but is bringing a clean CR to the House floor for an up or down vote entirely up to Boehner? and he's just afraid that doing so will enrage tea partiers who will call for his head? can't all the Repubs who WOULD vote for the clean CR and move on (which sounds like may be the majority?) put pressure on him, too?

i mean i dont think its impossible that boehner could be ousted if he brought a clean cr to the floor but id bet on him keeping his post

yes it is entirely up to Boehner, he calls bills to a vote

xp

yeah will you have it right, the thing is the republicans dont want to actually have to vote for the clean cr cause theyre afraid of someone using it against them in a primary, so what would happen is boehner would bring it to the floor then it would pass w mostly dem votes and a minimum of republicans

i think also theres an element of the leadership giving the wingnets enough rope to hang themselves

xpost
basically he's indefinitely furloughing ~800K people so he can keep his own prestigious position.

violating the "Hastert Rule"

xp

like you can have a week of this but then you have to pick up yr toys and go home

I think we've entered a phase (which we had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) in which speaker are non-entities, creatures of their caucuses.

Boehner's already violated the Hastert rule at least four times.

he wore a suit that fits?

lol

fwiw Washington Post disagrees with lagoon's analysis: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/john-boehner-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place-on-shutdown-and-debt-limit/2013/10/02/32a27f1a-2b9f-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html?hpid=z1

did someone put this quote in here:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/03/gop_congressman_were_not_going_to_be_disrespected/

“We’re not going to be disrespected,” Stutzman said. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

What are the chances of some of the stupidest right-wingest tea partiers being primaried to the left in the midterms? I mean, if the business community is really worried, they could pour money into these elections, and presumably taking the edge off the primary dynamic.

i fantasize about this, but have like zero faith.

sure, there are 'business community' folks who know that defaulting is some seriously bad shit. unfortunately i think we've reached the point where the purse strings are held by a rarefied group folks who don't really care one way or the other about the debt ceiling. they have the luxury of profiting either way... 'oh a credit downgrade you say? nbd. i'll just scoop up government securities at fire-sale prices while all the normals in their conservative fixed-income investment vehicles are forced to dump treasuries. an yo my inverse ETFs are going to clean up!'

and then for some (Kochs eg) the ideological fight has taken on mythic/spiritual quality. which of course applies to a disturbingly large number of the rank & file as well, folks who will easily be convinced that all negative fallout is 100% the fault if Obama/ "liberals"/ etc

That Stutzman quote actually made me laugh. It sounds like the tantrum of someone who insisted on going snowboarding and then clumsily ran into a tree and sustained brain damage.

Now that Boehner has survived several days of the shutdown, his friends say there is no point in moving a clean funding resolution.

That's from the W. Post article Shakey posted. If only we could have gotten a full shutdown-no retirement checks mailed; no payments to the military. Then we might have some movement.

Regarding the debt, my fear is Obama goes back to his grand bargain cutting Social Security strategy and pressures Dems in Congress to go along.

He has little leverage and no coat tails

fwiw Washington Post disagrees with lagoon's analysis

― Hip Hop Hamlet (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, October 3, 2013 1:10 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i must be right then B-)

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/03/gops_grim_shutdown_history_how_the_1995_debacle_turned_states_blue/

dem senators brought some props to their press time today

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BVqgc29IEAA5Cge.jpg

haha

that's good proppin'

oh man

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/03/denny-hastert-disses-the-hastert-rule-it-never-really-existed.html

Denny Hastert says the rule was never meant to be official, and then spends a few words on how incompetent Boehner is.

Denny Hastert will rue the day he prema-tricked his caucus into thinking we have a parliamentary system

The "Hastert Rule of Thumb" just doesn't have the same flavor.

“You know how Clinton was,” Hastert recalled, slipping into a pretty good imitation of Clinton’s easygoing chatter. There was plenty of time to banter before getting down to business. Hastert congratulated the president on his successful trip to Africa. Finally, Clinton asked, “What can I do for you?” “A haircut across the board,” Hastert replied. “I would suggest a 1 percent cut.” Can’t take that, Clinton said, offering all the reasons why that wouldn’t work. “What do you suggest?” Hastert asked him. A quarter of 1 percent, Clinton replied. “We dickered back and forth and settled on .86 percent, not because it was a magic number,” said Hastert. “But the moral of the story is Clinton would come to the table. I’m not going to go into the science of negotiating, but you can put one thing on the table and end up with something entirely different, but you’ve got to talk.”

Hastert said he doesn’t like to engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking and added: “I don’t want to overmanage John Boehner. I’m not in his shoes. But when we had things that were tough to do, I was constantly engaged—sitting at the table, bringing in conservatives, moderates. You can’t be in Congress and shut down government and get anything done. It’s an oxymoron.”

good piece http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/03/the-morning-plum-republicans-and-their-voters-are-stuck-in-2011

Ezra Klein & Grover Norquist:

EK: One aspect of this that you mention quite a bit, but that’s been somewhat lost in the debate, is that Republicans have really managed to hold the spending levels in the CR down. They’re below the original Ryan budget, for instance, and well below what President Obama and the Senate Democrats wanted. Yet Republicans feel like they’re failing because they’re focused on Obamacare. Do you think Republicans are winning on spending?

GN: Yes, absolutely. We won in 2011 and then again with the president making 85 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent. We really did get caps and sequestration that limits government spending. If we just went home and put the government on autopilot it would be a win. This Republican Congress has made a fundamental shift in the size of government equation.

Sequester is the big win. It defines the decade. You still have to fix long-term entitlements, but the other team isn’t willing to do that. So you either wait for a Republican president and the Ryan plan or you get people so concerned about sequestration that they’re willing to come to the table and fix entitlements long-term.

I guess this is from yesterday, but good zing.

http://i.imgur.com/5q1RU9U.png

hastert is talking some self-aggrandizing shit there

lol

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mcconnell-rand-paul-recorded-while-talking-shutdown-strategy-video

ok wtf just checked twitter -- shots fired at capitol, house in lockdown

o good

http://i.imgur.com/KypBE3U.png

grover norquist, voice of reason (sorta)

does Abraham Lincoln still have his own secret service unit?

Norquist acknowledging what smart people know: the GOP won two years ago.

?!?

Yeah I hope Obama recognizes that negotiating with the GOP in 2011 was the biggest mistake he made in his presidency, perhaps his entire life

Biggest mistake since converting to islam

can we pause for a second on the political ramifications of the shutdown and wait until we figure out what's going on here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress/us-capitol-police-capitol-in-lockdown-reports-of-gunshots-and-injured-capitol-police-officer/2013/10/03/fa65a594-2c59-11e3-b141-298f46539716_story.html?hpid=z1

US Capitol Police: Capitol in lockdown; reports of gunshots and injured Capitol police officer

hmm

"I am told shooter has been arrested. House floor activity stopped for now"

ok, back to speculating on political ramifications on the shutdown.

sorry for weird thread policing, it just kind of came out of nowhere and i can hear all the sirens outside and i got kinda freaked out

Yeah I hope Obama recognizes that negotiating with the GOP in 2011 was the biggest mistake he made in his presidency, perhaps his entire life

― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Thursday, October 3, 2013 2:32 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well tbf he was prob convinced the republicans were going to let the country default in order to crash the economy in order to make sure he wasnt reelected, it was a more difficult situation than people give it credit for

a lot of buzz going around right now that Boehner is pretty much resolved to put the clean CR up for a vote and will use the danger of debt default as his excuse

buzz going on where?

This story has been showing up in various places as a sign that Boehner has made up his mind.

Prior to the shots in the capitol, had a huge red link at the top of their page saying "Boehner Blinks" and linking to the Times article.

I don't know how definitive it all is, but it sounds like he isn't planning to hold out forever.

That article focuses on the debt, and that deadline is not till October 17th.

WASHINGTON — President Obama will not invoke a constitutional amendment to unilaterally increase the nation’s debt limit if an impasse with House Republicans causes that ceiling to be breached Oct. 17, his spokesman said.

“We do not believe that the 14th amendment provides that authority to the president,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said on Thursday. The president, he added, “completely” agrees with his advisers’ legal reasoning.

douthat tries to go deep

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/why-the-right-fights/

ie conservatives aren't stuck in 2011, they're stuck in the goldwater campaign