Still. STILL people refuse to believe this is where it’s headed, “Obama said he won’t compromise,” yadda yadda yadda. Don’t they know how to parse him yet? He said he won’t compromise ON THE DEBT CEILING. He didn’t rule anything else out. Two weeks ago, he said he’d deal on entitlements. Why can’t people look at the ugly reality?
Most House Republicans privately concede they’re fighting a battle they’re unlikely to win, and to avoid a prolonged shutdown and a disastrous debt default, Washington has to create a package so big that lifting the borrowing limit and funding the government is merely a sideshow.
[…]
“I want to get a budget agreement,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told POLITICO on Wednesday. “That’s what we’ve been about all along. So yeah, we think the issues are converging — [the continuing resolution] and debt limit — and from the get-go, we wanted to get a budget agreement to grow this economy and get this debt under control, especially before the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates. I think it’s in our nation’s interest to do that. And that’s one of the things we’re fighting for in addition to relief from Obamacare — or fairness from Obamacare.”
[…]
White House officials remain deeply skeptical that a grand bargain can be reached as long as Republicans refuse to raise tax revenue. But there are fresh signs Republicans would consider new revenue if they are not raising tax rates, and key Republicans told POLITICO that they would be interested in some of the items discussed by Boehner and Obama in 2011.The collision of a number of factors has sparked renewed talk of a grand bargain.
[…]
So with government shut down and the debt ceiling rapidly approaching in the next two weeks a large number of Republicans see a grand deficit compromise as the only plausible way out.
Members throughout the House Republican Conference are sounding a new tune on a potential deal. Republican Rep. Steve Stivers, a close Boehner ally from the Columbus, Ohio, area, said “guys like me” would consider revenue in a potential deal.“We’re getting closer to the point that everything’s intertwined — government funding, the debt ceiling and spending — and so the best way out, I believe, and the only way for everybody to find an acceptable long-term solution is a big negotiation of everything that includes something on entitlements, tax reform, something on a spending level and wrap it in one box,” Stivers told POLITICO.
The new governing MO. Manufacture a crisis to cover a sell out.
Once the T-bag faction is pushed out of the Republican caucus, which will hapen very soon, the Left will be up to bat. Will the Left stand strong against Obama and the other Democratic corporatists or not? That is the question. It’s been fun watching the T-baggers make mincemeat out of Boehner, but the time has come for the Left to begin making noise. The Left needs to shut all Democratic politicians down now. Except for Warren, Sanders, Grayson, and a few others.
Once the T-bag faction is pushed out of the Republican caucus, which will happen very soon, the Left will be up to bat. Will the Left stand strong against Obama and the other Democratic corporatists or not? That is the question. It’s been fun watching the T-baggers make mincemeat out of Boehner, but the time has come for the Left to begin making noise. The Left needs to shut all Democratic politicians down now. Except for Warren, Sanders, Grayson, and a few others.
The problem of course is that any “Grand Bargain Sellout” will only be ephemeral. It will take about a week and half for some Republican somewhere to notice that some old guy is collecting something called “social security”, and harumph, harumph, we’d better look into that and cut that.
And so they’ll gin up another crisis to do exactly that, while leaving the military-industrial-security perpetual war/spy machine intact.
Our only real hope is that somebody dreadfully miscalculates, somebody blows their lines in this little kabuki production, and we freaking default to the tune of a BBB rating or lower, and people can’t cash a savings bond for 2-3 months.
Then we can throw all these bums out, except for Warren, Sanders and Grayson, and try again with some representatives who represent people as opposed to corporate ‘persons’.
We can stipulate that a “Grand Bargain” is only made possible with Democratic cover. If the Republicans tried this alone they would suffer an electoral shelling. The Democrats have leverage by the bucketful on this subject. So here’s a test of whether the Democrats bargained at all. Look for stripping of income ceilings on Social Security and Medicare taxes; repeal of the hedge fund bracket; elimination of capital gains preferences; a transaction tax on securities; defense and intelligence cuts; restoration of food stamps. “The Republicans would never buy into any of that”, you say!
True and good. Then bargain as they do and take a hike. But the more sordid truth is that the Democrats will propose not one of these items in the quest for tax and entitlement “reform.” The confines of this betrayal were delineated in 2011. They are going to whore COLAs, raise eligibility age, needs index (ie confiscate defined benefit and public employee pension benefits) and slip through regressive tax increases. The deal will emerge in the middle of the night and get passed with the light of day before Democrats’ phone lines meltdown.
lless – I agree with your analysis. Good stuff. If they were to hold firm, and bargain on behalf of the people, the Democrats would utterly trounce the Rethugs in 2014 and all the obstruction would be a thing of the past.
But they won’t. They will cave; sell out their base as usual, and get the royal drubbing of their lives they so deserve in 2014.
For some very interesting bargaining positions, so very much in the interest of the people they would make you weep, note the link “Eschaton” has today to a column by “Hecate” on how she would conduct negotiations.
Now, that’s staking out your position and actually trying to get the other side to move to you, because for once your position is more extreme than that of the Rethugs. But it’s only the kind of negotiating you would get if you had somebody in office who was not a Reagan Republican admirer, and whose true purpose is to push for Corporate America for as much as he can get, and not the people who elected him.