Delaware Dem

Monday Open Thread [9.30.13]

The National Review on Speaker Boehner’s dilemma:

“That aura of Republican infighting will create an interesting dynamic if Tuesday morning comes without an accord. While Boehner and other leaders will be defending the GOP’s position in front of the cameras, there may be a subtle effort to use the episode — and what many expect to be its disastrous political results — as a means of discrediting the hardliners who give the speaker headaches. Conservatives, meanwhile, will try to show that the tactic is helping focus public attention on Obamacare.”

Said one veteran House Republican: “It may have to shut down. Until people feel the political pain, I doubt we can come together on anything. Boehner knows that, probably more than anyone.”

If Boehner does not allow the Senate’s clean CR to get a vote today, he and his Republican Representatives will be directly and solely responsible for the government shutdown and every single consequence resulting from it. As a result, if those consequences are negative, the Republicans may lose the House in 2014. But at the same time, if Boehner allows the clean CR to come to the floor for a vote, then the only way it passes is with a majority of Democrats and sane Republicans. Boehner has done this before, on the Hurricane Sandy Aid and on the Fiscal Cliff Deal. But if he does it this time, he will lose his Speakership.

So we are going to learn today whether Boehner is a opportunistic coward or a self sacrificing patriot.

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Thursday Open Thread [9.26.13]

Brian Beutler today at Salon:

What happened over the past 48 hours is a direct consequence of Republicans making sport out of misleading the public, and particularly conservatives, about the threat Obamacare poses to the country. It created an incentive for publicity-hungry members to stage more and more elaborate, but ultimately symbolic, anti-Obamacare performances

If Republicans really worried that Obamacare is as dangerous as they’ve been claiming for years — if they truly believed it will sap the middle class of ambition and bankrupt the country — then many more of them would have joined Cruz over the past 24 hours. At the very least, they wouldn’t have blown him off and attacked his motives and trashed him anonymously in the press.

But the deceptive nature of their opposition campaign created an opening for a false savior like Cruz to outperform them.

Republicans are annoyed with Cruz for plenty of reasons — he’s arrogant, he’s lying to primary voters about the limits of GOP power, he’s inching Congress toward a government shutdown most of the party wants to avoid. But a big subtext here is that he’s exposed the simple message that once united the party as a sham. If Obamacare is as perilous as the party claims, why wait until the next election to try and derail it? By swooping in like he did, knowing he couldn’t deliver, he actually exposed both charades — his own and his GOP antagonists’ — and left ACA intact.

So Republicans are liars. This is not news. What is news is that they might, finally, at long last, be paying a price for it.

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