Yesterday, Beutler predicted that Republican dead-enders in the House would oppose the Senate deal. They did. This morning, NRO’s Robert Costa predicted that “because the way the House GOP is running now, and given the internal politics, even THIS bill will have its challenges, let alone a Sen deal.” And he was right.
This morning, the GOP leadership could not get enough support from their own caucus for the alternative, tougher “compromise” they wanted. So we’re back to the Senate bill, which the House may have to reject and throw us into economic chaos or accept and step back from the brink. Beutler explains how the bill can still pass the House:
[A]s weak as his control of the House is, Boehner’s still officially the speaker — and as long as he’s officially the speaker, he controls the floor. The logical leap (really, the assumption) everyone’s making is that Boehner will put the Senate plan on the floor before midnight, rather than kowtow to the dead-enders to preserve his speakership. There are almost certainly 217-plus votes in the House for any deal that comes out of the Senate, which means we’ll only crash through the debt limit deadline if Boehner chooses to let the country default the same way he chose to shut down the government.
Ezra sees the logic of the Senate deal:
The timing of all this is designed to create a fight about sequestration.
The Jan. 15 deadline means funding for the federal government runs out at the exact moment sequestration’s deeper cuts kick in. The Dec. 13 deadline means that the full House and Senate would have time to consider any package of recommendations the bicameral committee comes up with, if the committee actually manages to come up with anything.
The deal isn’t official yet. It hasn’t passed the Senate yet. And it certainly hasn’t passed the House yet. But if it does clear those hurdles — and, again, that’s a big if — it’ll mean Republicans and Democrats have agreed to take what began as a fight over the Affordable Care Act and make it into a fight over sequestration.
If the Senate bill passes, Drum wonders whether we will get a “rerun of the whole mess next year”:
The evidence this time around has been pretty resounding that the public isn’t on the GOP’s side in this fight, and that might convince lot of Republican fence-sitters to nip things in the bud if the tea partiers try to start another hopeless war in February. Right now, public irritation with the budget fight probably hasn’t had any real effect on next year’s midterm elections, but if Republicans do it again and again, it might.
Which depends on the fallout within the GOP. Can they begin to rein in their nutters? Or are they all too afraid of them?
(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, speaks after a House Republican meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, October 15, 2013. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 