This can only mean one thing … President Cave-in Strikes Again
Posted: July 30, 2011 Filed under: Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, voodoo economics, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: Debt Ceiling, Federal Budget, Harry Reid, John Boehner, Mitche McConnell, Nancy Pelosi 14 CommentsIf you haven’t been watching live coverage of the leader on leader snit fit on the senate floor, you’re missing the clash of two realities. For all 
intents and purposes, Senate minority leader McConnell appears to be engaged in a filibuster of the Reid Plan in full expectation that he can make a deal with President Cave-in. The earlier speeches on the House floor were more raucous than the backbenchers in parliament. Representative Nancy Pelosi received applause, hoots, catcalls and boos. The acting speaker clearly lost control of house decorum.
GOP leaders appear to have been encouraged enough in behind closed doors White House meetings they held a press conference suggesting the stand off might be near an end. Senator Reid took to the senate floor to tell McConnell and Boehner they were sorely mistaken. You can see the coverage of the Boehner/McConnell Presser here.
“We are now fully engaged” with the White House said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a joint appearance with House Speaker John Boehner. “It should be clear … that Senator McConnell and I believe that we are going to be able to come to some sort of agreement,” Boehner said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi met alone with Obama and Biden, both the president and vice president have been in conversations with Boehner and McConnell.
Indeed, McConnell has been most insistent on this point, leading to some acerbic, amusing exchanges with Reid earlier in the day.
“He called the White House and said `Mr. President, let us do the deal,” Reid said of McConnell. “And now he’s telling the president he wants the president to do the deal.”
“We cannot reach a deal without the president. We tried that,” McConnell answered. “I’ll concede the point…but it makes my point that there’s no way under the constitutional system for my friend and I to work this out we have to have the president at the table.”
The biggest two outstanding issues are the Republicans’ insistence on “dollar-for-dollar” deficit reductions –without new tax revenues—to match any increase in the Treasury’s borrowing authority. And second, what enforcement mechanism is best to ensure that a new joint House-Senate committee will be able to come up with an estimated $1.6 trillion in savings by the end of this year.
The Republican leaders in Congress signalled that they were close to reaching a deal with President Barack Obama to raise the US borrowing limit and stave off a devastating default, a breakthrough that would relieve markets – and ordinary Americans – if it were to happen.
But in a sign of the confusion on Capitol Hill about how parties would end the impasse, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said Republican claims of new progress on a debt ceiling deal are “not true”.
But “the process has not been moved forward,” Mr Reid said.
Pelosi pulled out a Star Wars reference on the House floor, saying that Speaker John Boehner “chose to go to the dark side” and court the most conservative members of his conference, rather than work on a bipartisan compromise.
“It’s time for us to end this theater of the absurd,” she said. “It’s time for us to get real.”
The House struck down the Democratic measure, 173-246, in a vote that was designed to fail. Boehner brought the measure up under a special rule that required a two-third majority for passage.
“This thing is not on the level,” Pelosi said before the vote.
Boehner’s office said Saturday morning that the vote on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s legislation would show that the Nevada Democrat’s plan can’t pass the House, dismissing it as a “pointless political exercise.”
Despite the House’s pre-emptive rejection of the Reid plan, Senate Democrats say they are moving forward with its consideration. The Senate is tentatively scheduled to take up Reid’s proposal beginning at 1 a.m. ET on Sunday — part of that chamber’s arcane procedural path required to get something passed before the Treasury runs out of funds.
Any proposal put forward by Reid will ultimately need the support of at least seven Senate Republicans in order to reach the 60-vote margin required to overcome a certain GOP filibuster.
Forty-three of the Senate’s 47 Republicans sent a letter to Reid Saturday promising to oppose his plan as currently drafted. Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Massachusetts’ Scott Brown, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski declined to sign it.
McConnell urged Reid early Saturday afternoon to hold a quick vote on his bill in order to clear the way for new talks.
Your plan “will not pass the Senate. It will not pass the House It is simply a nonstarter,” McConnell told Reid on the Senate floor. “Hold the vote here and now” and let’s “not waste another minute of the nation’s time.”
Reid responded by accusing the Republicans of wasting time on the Boehner plan, and criticized the Senate GOP for not allowing his plan to be considered with a simple majority vote.
“The two parties must work together to forge an agreement that preserves this nation’s economy,” Reid said. “My door is still open.”
It’s getting pretty obvious what the dynamic is now. The Republican leadership in Congress has absolutely no control over its rogue teabot faction which appears to be made up of people that cannot be reasoned with, have no clue about how the constitution sets up the passage of laws, and never cracked a book on finance or economics in their lives. The Democratic leadership are about to have the legs knocked out from under them again by President Cave-In. The Republicans are stalling until President Cave-In forces Democrats to fully give in to Republican demands. Get ready for the next recession. It’s on its way . From my vantage point, the teabots are terrorists and the President and the Republican leadership are in negotiations with them.
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Yep, I think the Republicans have Obama where they want him.
First the republicans only wanted to deal with obama. Then said obama was like jello and went to pelosi and Reid. Now the want Mr. Jello again. Telling. Very telling.
Bill and Hillary need to take Obama into the back room and talk sense at him till it penetrates. They can start by teaching him to count to 14.
What happens if Obama doesn’t cave? And suppose the Republicans don’t cave either? Probably a recession, right?
The thing is, I don’t disagree with your assessment that a deal will probably lead to a recession. It’s just at this point, I think we are probably doomed either way.
Obama and the Democrats lost this battle way before now.
I agree. A deal still will cause a recession. It won’t cause a global financial crisis. I still support invoking the 14th.
This is truly the Theatre of the Absurd. How can any of these clowns look at themselves in a mirror when so many people are out of work and losing everything not to mention the global impact. I suspect that this will only cement the desire of other countries to replace the U.S. dollar.
Yeah, I think the theater is merely to set the stage for a capitulation in the making. Drum up the fear of total chaos and financial destruction to get what Obama and his Republican chums wanted all along: the big 3 on the chopping block, the Gang of Six heralded as heroes and Obama whining that he ‘had no choice.’ Of course, putting the social safety net into play was Obama’s suggestion to begin with. McConnell comes out of the WH smiling like an overfed cat, while Reid’s group comes out looking ashen.
The Republicans and their raving TP sidekicks have made it perfectly clear: their way or the highway. For Obama, he can say he got his Grand Bargain, a bipartisan masterpiece/nightmare. This is what happens when you have a President with no real principles of his own. His worry is he won’t get to attend his birthday party/fundraiser. And the American public once again gets the hair shirt that the elites of the world obviously feel we deserve to wear in perpetuity.
A disgusting performance. Obama needs to be shown the door!
It sounds to me as if President Pushover is in the process of stabbing Harry and Nancy in the back.
Pelosi wants Obama to invoke the 14th amendment.
Yes. Another club member.
This is insane. Obama is in so far over his head it is simply unbelievable. I agree with those who think Obama thought he could get his Grand Bargain by putting Social Security and Medicare cuts up front and center (though they have nothing to do with the deficit) – and then the Repubs turned him down!
Now, he’s turning on his own party. Yes, he’s done that before – repeatedly – but not with the Democratic Party pillars of Social Security and Medicare. He’s going to cede everything. And the country watches the quisling in chief in total disbelief. I don’t see how he personally ever recovers from this lack of leadership.
And none of this even needed to happen.
The Tea Party fools in Congress are intractable. Obama gives in to anything. Holy mackerel – what a nightmare. The rest of the Dems in Congress don’t count. And, of course, we out here never counted.
Obama has been Jimmy Carter-ed and then some.
Yeah, but Carter did have some principles, didn’t he? Although I can’t actually remember the last time I thought a politician had principles. Maybe he sold out too. I don’t know.
Anyway, we’re headed directly to a depression now. I mean, if they want us to buy stuff, they have to give us money, instead of starving us. How hard is that to comprehend?
OMG, the hardship, the suffering, that is coming down the pike for the middle class, the poor, the elderly, the children, the sick – it is too horrible to contemplate. I don’t see how the country survives.
I alternate between rage and horror. Not a single person down there with a brain and a heart.
Thank you dak for making the chaotic theater more understandable. Problem is with this theater our lives are and will be impacted by the lies and stupidity of 0bowma. We have a lot of well trained economists willing to blog about 0bowma’s ignorance of economics — he is in way over his head. Future leaders are getting an education in what not to do.
When we elect a president we expect leadership — healthy leadership. We aren’t getting that leadership from 0bowma — and Republican politicians are exploiting 0bowma’s weakness.
One name for 0bowma’s leadership style is laissez-fair
A sub category of laissez-fair is toxic leadership — and 0bowma meets the criteria for this as well. The dem party will be in absolute shambles by the end of his reign — in worse shape than GW bush’s reign.
“Researchers found that children under delegative leadership, also known as laissez-fair leadership, were the least productive of all three groups. The children in this group also made more demands on the leader, showed little cooperation and were unable to work independently.
Delegative leaders offer little or no guidance to group members and leave decision-making up to group members. While this style can be effective in situations where group members are highly qualified in an area of expertise, it often leads to poorly defined roles and a lack of motivation.”
One way you know that the leadership style are your own emotional response — pure frustration — like you are on a ship without a rudder.
http://psychology.about.com/od/leadership/a/leadstyles.htm
Here’s a book I found that goes on my reading list: Lipman-Blumen, Jean. The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians–and How We Can Survive Them. Oxford University Press, USA. September 2004