This can only mean one thing … President Cave-in Strikes Again

If 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.

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.