Delaware Dem

Republican Shutdown and Debt Apocalypse Open Thread, Day 7

A Republican congressman gives his a history lesson:

The congressman began with an anecdote from the Civil War. “I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn’t intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it,” the congressman said. “That’s basically what’s happening now in a political sense. This isn’t exactly the fight I think Republicans wanted to have, certainly that the leadership wanted to have, but it’s the fight that’s here.”

So the GOP is the Confederacy, about to be slaughtered in battle.

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No Face Savers

Once again I keep hearing that for Boehner to get himself out of this mess of his own creation, he will need some kind of face saving concession that he can take to his mouth breathers. However, if today is any indication, there will be no face saver for Boehner.

Today was spent easily boxing Boehner into yet another corner of his own making, after the Speaker’s unwise comments on Sunday that he did not have the votes for either a clean CR or a clean debt ceiling vote. The response from all united Democrats everywhere was obvious to all: Prove it. Hold the vote. Do it now. That was the mantra today. But Boehner, being the weakest and most strategically dumb Speaker in the history of the United States, can’t do that, for, as everyone knows, both bills would pass.

The only way out of this now for Boehner is for him to, pardon the expression, Ladies, man up. Take his medicine. Face the consequences. Allow votes on both clean bills, allowing both to pass. Yes, he will in all likelihood lose his job of Speaker as a result, but that is not our fault. It is his. If he does not do it, yes, he may remain Speaker, for a while. But being solely responsible for a continued government shutdown and then a debt default that plunges the nation in the Great Depression II, his name will go down in history as more infamous and loathsome than Herbert Hoover. And then the GOP will lose the House.

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The Impeachment Scenario

Let’s say the Republican traitors refuse to raise the debt ceiling (and yes, my Republican friends, I consider that to be an act of treason against the United States for the Constitution of the United States requires you to see to it that debts of the country are paid). What does the President do then?

I honestly don’t know. But Professor Eric Posner reviews the ways Obama could justify unilaterally raising the debt ceiling.

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