The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

As
discussed here on Thursday, on Friday the
House passed the “Keep the IRS
Off Your Health Care Act” by a 232-185 vote, the 40th repeal of
Obamacare by the House. Now, they leave DC until September 9th.

When they
return, the battle lines will be drawn for the fight between House Republicans
and the White House on the government’s statutory borrowing limit.

The New York Times reported that Mr. Obama,
while speaking to the House Democratic Caucus on Capitol Hill, was asked by Rep.
Peter Welch (D-VT), what his strategy would be in the face of signals by
Republicans that they would demand major concessions before they voted to raise
the government’s statutory borrowing limit. Mr. Obama said:  

Mr. Obama has been trying to
triangulate the House’s Tea Party Republicans since the start of his 2nd
term. He had success with the fiscal cliff, when the American Taxpayer Relief
Act passed both Houses on
January 1, 2013; the US Senate passed it by a margin of 89–8. The House passed the same legislation without
amendments by a vote of 257–167, with
151 Republicans opposing it.

His
strategy has not seen other success. The Farm Bill, the Transportation and
Department of Housing and Urban Development Bill and Comprehensive Immigration Reform,
have all been left by the side of the road in the House.

Will
Mr. Obama’s strategy work with the borrowing limit?

Speaker
Boehner is signaling that he does not plan to cooperate, threatening to not
raise the debt ceiling. He said:

So, does Boehner control his caucus? He couldn’t with the appropriations
bill for the Department of Transportation and Department of Housing and Urban
Development (appropriately nicknamed THUD) and had to pull the bill from
the floor.
Apparently, Mr. Boehner needs to bone up on math. His problem with THUD is similar
to the failed
farm bill.
The vote on the Farm Bill was 234-195 against passage, as 62 Republicans voted against the bill.

In these two
failures you can see a mortal threat to the existence of the Republican
governing majority in the House. Let’s remember what the Wrongologist wrote
about Speaker Boehner’s leadership problem:

So if you
can’t find 218 Republicans out of 234 to vote for a bill, the other option is
to start with the 201 Democrats and try to add two dozen Republicans.

This is at the heart of Mr. Obama’s
strategy on the borrowing limit, and at the heart of his grand strategy to
splinter the Republican House. Some in DC call this strategy “Pelosi Plus.” And any
threat by Boehner to only offer a Republican Majority House bill on the issue
of the borrowing limit is at best, a bargaining ploy.

A
coalition that fractures the Republican majority in the House could happen, since
any bill passed in the House also needs to pass a majority-Democratic Senate
and be signed into law by a Democratic president. While the Republican majority
may be immune to electoral
defeat,
thanks to favorable district boundaries—it’s not immune to its own dysfunction
in day-to-day governance.

So, can Mr. Obama win
with this strategy? By
saying what he did to Rep. Welch, Mr. Obama has set expectations for the global
financial markets as well as for Mr. Boehner. The economy is getting better,
there is more revenue, consumers are more hopeful, the deficit is shrinking.
He’s on the road with a message to the electorate that he’s not running for office;
he just wants to help the middle class. He’s giving details about how that can
happen and that the GOP is stopping it.  

In the Senate, the
GOP is starting to splinter on the debt ceiling, with a few Republican senators
trying to work with Mr. Obama. He’s held out his hand and offered to work with
them all along and they know it.

The GOP will come
back in September and no matter how much they whip up their base, the rest of
the country sees what they are trying to do. In the GOP splinter group, they
are already talking about a shut down being stupid, and they are all facing the
2014 election cycle. Big business and big money are both pressuring the GOP to
act responsibly. And Mr. Boehner has
drawn an intractable line in the sand so something’s gotta give, and the
President is saying it won’t be him.

That just puts more
pressure on Boehner.

The thing about this wrestling match
that is particularly absurd is how the Beltway media seems completely OK with
the idea that Mr. Boehner values keeping his job as Speaker over defaulting on America’s
debt. Failure to extend the borrowing limit would have all sorts of negative
international consequences, but the media won’t fault John Boehner for not putting
his job in jeopardy in order to avoid it. Their logic is that if he goes the Pelosi Plus route, he would have
to haul his bourbon bottles out of the
Speaker’s office.

The media accepts that he
will do nothing rather than allow THAT to happen.

The
landscape indicates that Mr. Obama will hold firm. If the Republicans can’t
pass a clean bill extending the debt limit and we face a government shut down, then for all practical purposes we will have reached a
point where we might as well have no
federal government. Then, Mr. Obama will order Jack Lew, his
Treasury Secretary, to keep paying the bills, citing the 14th Amendment.

There are so many nihilists in the Tea
Party caucus
and so many unusual, crosscutting pressures on the full GOP caucus (such as
Sen. McConnell’s effort to avoid a Tea Party challenge in his primary), that the GOP might just shut
down the government, simply because they can’t get their act together.

In the
aftermath, they would be humiliated and in no mood for another fight. Remember when Gingrich did exactly that in 1995 and 1996. If it happens again, the fracturing of the
Republican party in the House would most likely be complete.

No one should wish for broken
government, or a broken Republican party. But they are bringing it on
themselves. Since Republicans are predominantly Christians, they know that you
have to die to be resurrected. Don’t count on this scenario creating an
opportunity to reclaim the House from the Republicans, but it could cause the
number of Tea Party caucus members to decline precipitously in 2014.

Please proceed, GOP.

Then pass the popcorn, things
are gonna get bitchy.