The most pitiful part of what’s happening right now isn’t the cave itself, which was predictable since day one of the quixotic “defund” effort, but the fact that they’re going to drag it out another day or two to the bitter end purely for theatrical purposes. There’s a 99 percent chance that Reid will reject whatever emerges tonight from the House, leaving Boehner to float a clean debt-ceiling hike tomorrow and let Pelosi and the Democrats bail him out, but in order to marginally reduce the upset among grassroots conservatives, he’s going to push this to the last possible moment. That means passing — hopefully — one more House bill to show that he really did try to get something in return for raising the debt limit, even though what he and House Republicans are now asking for barely qualifies as “something.”
Now that the medical-device tax is out, the already weak House bill has even fewer ObamaCare-related demands in it than it did this morning. And the punchline is, it’s been pulled not as a concession to Obama but because House conservatives regard it as a giveaway to business lobbyists. As James Antle put it, “So the only easily gettable Obamacare concession is out because Rs can’t sell it as Obamacare concession.”
Conservatives complained today that delaying the [medical-device] tax would be “crony capitalism” and they can’t sell it to the Republican base as a viable Republican win.But that swift change hasn’t stalled the GOP’s push for a Tuesday vote. “The leaders are giving us one more chance to get something passed out of the House before the Senate does its thing,” says a veteran House Republican. “I think we’ll get it through, at least that’s my sense of things now. We want to do something that marks our position, so we don’t end up swallowing whatever terrible bait the Senate casts our way. Now, I know, and the majority of us know, that this is futile. But believe me, even getting to 218 on this plan will be an achievement.”…House insiders say Boehner’s fear is that conservative activists and powerful conservative groups start to align against the bill and rattle its fragile coalition. If that happens, and the bill’s support falls apart, a simple, six-week debt-ceiling extension is still in the leadership’s back pocket, but there’s no plan to bring that up anytime soon. More likely, should things fizzle on the whip front, is that another conference meeting is called and the House GOP “gets real,” as one Boehner ally puts it, about “what’s possible within divided government, and whether Republicans are willing to back anything at all.”
Translation: The leadership’s going to make one last stand tonight to show conservative voters that they really fought on this, even though what they’re now fighting for is worthless to everyone, and then inform House conservatives tomorrow that they have no choice but to pass some sort of clean debt-ceiling hike with Democratic help. That’s because “what’s possible within divided government” was painfully apparent two weeks ago, but if Boehner had caved then instead of now, he would have been accused of not “trying.” So he went through the motions of trying, up to and including a shutdown, and now it’s time to do the responsible thing and not risk a new recession with a technical default. Meanwhile, the Senate isn’t doing anything right now except waiting to see if Boehner can get anything passed through the House with Republican votes. If he can’t, then Reid will might well end up demanding that even the token concessions to the GOP in his bill with McConnell be dropped. After all, it’ll be Democrats who are now the main actors in passing something in the lower chamber, not Republicans.
Via: Hot AIr
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