LOL. John Becker woke up thinking of this song this morning:
A hostage crisis can end very badly, but when they end peacefully with no bloodshed, with no harm to the hostages, what normally happens at the end is that the hostage takers are forced to their knees with their hands up, and then they are ordered to lay down with their hands behind their back, which are then cuffed. The criminal is then violently jerked to his feet and frogmarched out to the police car.
We Americans, as victims of a crime, are not going to get that closure.
Brian Beutler on the day that was:
With the Treasury Department scheduled to run out of room under the debt ceiling this week, House Republicans decided that a good thing to do would be to waste all of Tuesday.
That’s literally what they did.
The day began with Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell on the cusp of an agreement to increase the debt limit and reopen the government, and it ended with Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell on the cusp of an agreement to increase the debt limit and reopen the government. Fortunately, they now seem to be on track to deliver the country from this GOP-imposed crisis.
But in between, those discussions went into abeyance because John Boehner and the rest of the House Republican leadership, under ceaseless pressure from the ultraconservatives in their conference, couldn’t countenance the affront to their leadership.
In the midst of a bitter re-election fight, McConnell returned to the legislative fray, against his own political interests, to rescue House Republicans from their incompetence. When the details of his tentative deal with Reid leaked, House Republicans accused him of surrender. He arrived to pull Boehner and his leadership team off the tracks and they repaid him by throwing him under the train.
I know some of you are worried that Cruz et all will derail this in the Senate. I am not. Neither is Brian:
An individual senator or group of senators that held up the plan would own the ensuing market reaction forever. It’s hard to win the presidency if you’re responsible for the Cruz Crash. It’s hard to finance a re-election campaign if the public thinks you destroyed its wealth and institutional donors know how reckless you are.
I would also add that their lives would be in danger. An angry mob gathering in a post apocalyptic post default hellscape formerly known as Washington DC would think nothing of going all Marie Antoinette on Cruz and Lee.
Josh Barro on his own party’s incompetence:
There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power. A party that is this bad at tactics can’t be expected to be any good at policy-making.
In my perfect world, every single Republican elected official across the country, no matter if their office is federal, state or local, executive, legislative or judicial, would resign after this defeat. These same Republican elected officials would then be barred from ever participating in politics again in any fashion whatsoever. In essence, these Republicans would be sent into political exile. New Republicans wishing to run for office in upcoming elections must make public recorded statements under oath that they repudiate and reject the tactics and rhetoric of the Republican Party from 1964 until 2013.
Jonathan Bernstein on whether Ted Cruz will survive his treason to remain a viable presidential candidate:
“It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.”
Daniel Larison agrees: “What may hurt Cruz’s prospects as a presidential candidate most is the fact that he will not or cannot acknowledge that he was wrong in promoting his failed strategy. As if to prove how oblivious to political reality he is, he was at it again today in his speech this morning.”