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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Sounds Like the House GOP May Be Ready to Take Senate Deal

      The offer, of course, is the Don Corelone offer as Krugman showed us. 

      http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/almost-over/

      The Senate was ready to take the Corleone deal yesterday. The offer, of course, is nothing. Now the House based on a number of reports seems to be ready for the same. We have the moderate Washington Republican Jamie Herrera telling her party that it's time to face reality. 

     "Nothing positive will be achieved by prolonging this shutdown any longer, or crossing the debt limit threshold," Herrera Beutler said in a statement. "It’s time for my colleagues to face reality."

     "Until Tuesday, Herrera Beutler, known as a moderate, had not been among the Republicans calling for a clean continuing resolution to reopen the federal government. She said she stayed silent because she wanted to "give House Republican leaders leeway to craft the best deal they could."
     "But it’s time to reopen the government and ensure we don’t default on our debt," she said in her statement. "I will not vote for poison pills that have no chance of passing the Senate or being signed into law."

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/jamie-herrera-beutler-shutdown_n_4103752.html

     From what many GOP Reps and their aides are saying it sounds like they just want to take the Senate deal already and limit the harm it's doing to their party. One GOP aide tweeted: "It's all over. We'll take the Senate deal." An email from a GOP Congressman read "Time to rollover."
    
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/john-boehner-harry-reid_n_4103938.html

    There's also a report that Boehner is letting Reid know that he'll cooperate. 

     "The office of Speaker Boehner told the office of Majority Leader Harry Reid's on Tuesday night that they would be willing to send them a "message" so that the procedural process of getting a debt limit and government funding bill could move faster."

     "The communication between the two was first reported by Salon's Brian Beutler and was confirmed by an aide to the Huffington Post. The aide said that the news was delivered after House Republican leadership failed to move their own bill to resolve the dual matters."
      "A message is a legislative vehicle that if sent from Boehner to the Senate would allow Reid to skip one cloture vote. This would ensure that if one Senator wanted to gum up the works, he or she could only force 30 hours of consideration."
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/republicans-senate-deal_n_4103370.html

    As McCain says the GOP has lost this battle.

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/10/john-mccain-understands-gop-has-lost.html

    How do you win a battle when you don't even know what you're fighting for? The main thing they were fighting for was a kind of Zizekean Thing which is more or less undefinable. Just something to prevent a loss of face. I'd say they accomplished that-I mean they lost but at least they kept their dignity. 

    This has been very important nevertheless. It's been argued that the GOP has been fighting for the right to extortion more than anything, the right to extort something, that Thing the Democrats don't want. So, today, when Boehner couldn't get his chaotic GOPers on the same page, at one point the 2 year delay of the medical device tax for Obamacare was proposed. It was dropped because a number of Democrats might either support it or not mind all that much in any case. 

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/10/15/its-still-extortion-for-the-sake-of-extortion/

   For the Dems it's about defanging debt ceiling extortion once and for all. 

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/15/the-morning-plum-dems-think-theyre-killing-debt-limit-gop-extortion-for-good/

   This morning I wrote a post about Larry Summers claim that our government is not as dysfunctional at lesat structurally as it may appear. 

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/10/larry-summers-on-if-us-has-too-sluggish.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiaryOfARepublicanHater+%28Diary+of+a+Republican+Hater%29

   I think that as Greg Sargent argues, this is about what the norms of governing really are. Many of noted that the Gingrich House of the 90s looks almost moderate compared to the Tea Party House we have now. Yet, Gingrich was who inaugurated the kind of scorched earth partisanship we've become accustomed to from the GOP. Victory for the Dems will hopefully being to re-educate the GOP about these norms. 

     "When Chait claims the “principle undergirding the emerging Senate bill — ending hostage tactics, and making all deals reciprocal — is unacceptable to House Republicans,” that may sound like a partisan argument, because of the “hostage” imagery. But it isn’t. It’s a description of the actual Republican position – that it’s appropriate for the House to demand concessions from Dems in exchange for a debt ceiling hike, because setting such conditions for budget talks is within the House’s authority. Republicans don’t put it quite like that — they euphemistically claim it’s routine for budget deals to be “attached” to debt ceiling hikes. That’s a huge stretch, but putting that aside, the practical upshot of that argument is that, as long as Republicans are going to ask for extensive unilateral concessions in that context, it’s entirely proper for the threat of default and economic havoc to give House Republicans leverage to extract those concessions. (Privately, Paul Ryan has explicitly argued the debt limit must be retained as leverage against Obamacare.) Republicans believe this set of conditions is within the House’s authority to establish, and that it constitutes acceptable governing."

     "Democrats, by contrast, don’t believe this constitutes acceptable governing. They don’t believe budget negotiations should proceed under these conditions. They are not making an argument about what the House majority can legally or Constitutionally do; they are making an argument about what they believe the House majority should and shouldn’t do, about what does and doesn’t constitute good governing. They are making an argument about governing norms. The Dem argument is that this practice should be renounced by both sides. Dems believe making concessions under these conditions now will legitimize the GOP demand for negotiations to happen under them, making default later all but certain, because this sort of standoff will happen again and again, ultimately leading to miscalculation and disaster."
     I agree, this is about governing norms. What's said is that this now needs to be made explicit. Until the rise of Gingrich and his Contract with American, it didn't need to be. 
  

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