Is this a good or a bad thing?
The New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama strode into the White House briefing room shortly after the vote, less to hail the end of this fiscal crisis than to lay out a marker for the next one.
“The one thing that I think hopefully the new year will focus on is seeing if we can put a package like this together with a little bit less drama, a little less brinkmanship, and not scare the heck out of folks quite as much,” he said.
But he warned Republicans against trying to use a forthcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling to extract spending concessions.
“While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills they’ve already racked up through the laws they have passed,” he said. “Let me repeat, we can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred.”
Even Fox News seems ambivalent:
The final vote in the House put Speaker John Boehner in a tricky position. The tally showed twice as many Democrats supporting the bill as Republicans – with 172 Democrats in favor, compared with 85 Republicans. It was enough to pass it, but ran afoul of the time-honored practice of passing bills that most members of the majority party support. While Boehner and former Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, R-Wis., voted for the bill, some of Boehner’s top deputies – notably Republican Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. – opposed it. Boehner is facing a vote to retain his speakership in a matter of days.
The House was able to shoehorn in the vote before the markets open Wednesday. Uncertainty about a deal threatened to wreak havoc on Wall Street. And economists warned that any prolonged stalemate into 2013 threatened to pull the broader economy back into a recession. In total, more than $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts were set to take effect this year.
And both Issa and the stooge trio are done. Their little tantrum this morning, including Boehner telling Reid “Go fuck yourself,” followed by saying "Fuck you to him twice when he thought he wasn’t heard properly has sealed their 2014 fate.
I’m gonna go ahead and call that “America won twice.”
Unfortunately, the debt ceiling and the sequester issues are still unresolved. Watch for Cantor and his fellow teabagging Repugs to continue to pitch a fit and obstruct everything when they don’t get their way.
This past Congress distinguished themselves by refusing to compromise on anything, even when this would potentially harm everyone. Fox News did much to exacerbate the situation by encouraging these people to stay as far out on the limb as possible. So that they caused a downgrade of our credit rating and couldn’t even agree to do this work until after it was already too late.
A few points of this mess are pretty clear. The GOP group was clearly waiting to make sure they wouldn’t have to vote on this until after the deadline passed, so they could say they were lowering taxes rather than raising them. (Which belies the point that technically they did raise them…) The GOP group was fractured, in that some wanted to follow John Boehner when he made a deal with President Obama, and others are still refusing to do anything with the Democrats.
It looks very likely that Eric Cantor will try to challenge Boehner’s position, and one has to wonder how that will go down. If Cantor does this, it will mark a clear divide between two generations of the GOP – one of which trying to actually govern, and the other one trying to campaign full time. How this develops will be very interesting.
The sad part about this is that it’s obvious that we’re headed for a repeat of the debt ceiling debacle within a month, and this was clearly the intent of the GOP and of Fox News. President Obama clearly wanted to end the speculation about this early and move on to other areas. But the GOP wants to play chicken with that deadline again, hoping they can get more leverage out of there somewhere. The likely result will be another downgrade – directly tied to GOP obstinance.
One would hope that the GOP would learn from what happened in 2012, where they lost on almost every front in the end. But it seems they’re just digging in their heels.
My own impression is that yes, this is a good thing.
