The Week : "Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation than the Boehner plan" - "the Boehner plan is a referendum on his speakership and it may be doomed"

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"The same Tea Partiers who crowned Boehner speaker are now kneecapping him".

The Week -
The List -
John Boehner’s debt-vote delay: 5 lessons -
Unable to convince rogue conservatives to support his debt-ceiling bill, Boehner postpones the vote rather than be humiliated on the House floor
July 29, 2011


John Boehner’s debt-vote delay: 5 lessons


Some excerpts :

House Speaker John Boehner did not secure enough votes Thursday night to pass his debt plan, and what happens next is anyone's guess.

John Boehner couldn't get it done. With an Aug. 2 deadline to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt limit looming, the House speaker failed to secure enough Republican votes to pass his much criticized two-step plan. The vote — on which Boehner has all but staked his speakership — was delayed for hours on Thursday night as GOP leaders pulled Tea Party-backed congressman behind closed doors for arm-twisting and pizza. All to no avail

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The Tea Party unwillingess to accept that victory [ The Boehner Plan ] threatens the U.S. "Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation," says Joe Klein at TIME. This "is a self-inflicted wound of monumental stupidity." Republicans, who are "willing to concede nothing," are glibly playing poker with the global economy.

3. Which means a bipartisan plan is the only way out

It's "time for the remaining grown-ups in Washington...," says The Washington Post, "to figure out how to help the country slip off the noose." The country simply must lift the debt ceiling, or face economic catastrophe. With Republicans stonewalling Boehner, he'll need the votes of at least some Democrats — and that means Congress needs an alternative to his current plan, time-crunch be damned. "The only path forward in the House is one that brings together the relative moderates in both parties to what passes for a middle ground."

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5. Boehner's speakership may be doomed

"It's all about John Boehner now — nothing else," says Erick Erickson at RedState. He has convinced his GOP caucus that this fight is no longer about opposing Obama or cutting the debt — it's a referendum on his speakership. And he's in jeopardy, says Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo. Thursday night's failure was a "stunning rebuke of House Republican leaders" and simply "devastating for Boehner." It's a bit ironic, too, says James Rowley at Bloomberg, that the same Tea Partiers who crowned Boehner speaker are now kneecapping him.

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