Debt ceiling endgame

The Tea Party made a critical miscalculation when it forced Boehner to pull his original package last week and now is when Boehner's tenuous grip on his caucus translates into lost leverage in negotiations. The wingnuts were convinced that they needed to send a message going into final negotiations: We will not yield. They believed that by demonstrating their strength they would steer the resulting deal closer to their line in the sand. Stake out the most extreme position, they thought, and they would get more of what they want when the negotiators split the difference between the opposing visions.

In fact, their actions all but ensured that a deal will be cut without their votes, and thus without their input. Their show of resolve sent a message all right, but how this message was received by players more astute than the average Tea Partier is quite a different matter. Consider:

Confronted with the possibility of owning a default, the speaker has no choice but to compromise, so he needed to demonstrate to his Democratic counterparts that he could unify his members behind a deal of his design. When the hardliners sunk Boehner's bill, they didn't signal their primacy within the process; they exposed the softness of Boehner's right flank. As congressional leaders hash out a deal, they now know that the speaker's far right members will abandon him at the slightest whiff of compromise. Yet other than the Tea Party, all the players will and must make sacrifices. So if Boehner can't rely on Republican votes, where will they come from when the inevitable compromise emerges? House Democrats. And these guys won't be inclined to cast their lot with the negotiators unless something is done to sweeten the deal for them.

The Democrats have been negotiating with hot air

Boehner does not have a majority of the House behind him. It's a simple, arithmetic truth. But what does that tell us about the Republican Speaker with whom Senate Democrats and the White House have been negotiating? He's played all this time, asking for trillions in cuts that dismayed Democrats, fighting off new revenue, on a very weak hand. And he was on the verge of getting much of what he wanted by bluffing.

We now know that Boehner is not the head of a majority party in the House, but a partner in a coalition government with the Tea Party. And the junior partners declined to support a cornerstone of his political strategy. Boehner wants to govern, midwife a few big pieces of legislation, and build a legacy. That involves cutting spending when possible and yes, raising the debt ceiling as necessary. But we now know he cannot deliver.

At this point, the leader of the Republicans in Congress might be forgiven for judging himself closer to the Democrats than to his own base.

Gambling on the debt ceiling

Ever since talks with the White House collapsed, the fight over the debt ceiling has fallen to Congress, where it's devolved into competing shows of force between the Democratic-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House. Both have offered their own bills, and it's pathetic because neither bill actually has the votes to make it out of its own chamber. Harry Reid might be able to cobble together a majority for his proposal, but he'll need Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. Boehner can't even count on votes from his own party, whose restive Tea Party caucus is simply not interested in raising the ceiling (or governing, for that matter). And complicating matters for Boehner, Pelosi's Democrats are going to vote "no" en masse to force him to find the votes within his own conference. At the moment, the stalemate between the two chambers of Congress looks like nothing so much as an arthritic mating display, and they're not even fooling each other with their empty posturing and geriatric chest-puffing.

But the dynamics of the standoff may favor Harry Reid as things progress, even though Senate Democrats are currently unable to move his bill. It takes time to negotiate a new bill, for the agreement to be marked up as a bill, for the CBO to score the mark-up, and then for Congress to vote on it. Since we're only a week away from defaulting, Dems and Reps need to come to an agreement very soon. And as soon as either Reid or Boehner shows his hand by calling for a vote in his chamber, we will see that both are negotiating from a position of weakness. If the House votes first and their bill fails to pass, House Republicans might lose their leverage as moderate Senate Republicans scramble to work with Harry Reid. However, in the event that the Senate votes first and fails to move Reid's bill, I still don't think Boehner stands a much better shot at pushing his proposal through, since the far right-wing of his party is a main obstacle in the House and they seem uninterested in exploiting the looming deadline.

In order to propel his bill ahead of the Democrats', Boehner needs to show that he can assemble a majority. That would pretty much tank the Democrats' plans. But his prospects were damaged today by a disappointing score from the CBO and warnings by Wall Street that a short-term debt limit hike is insufficient - which spells bad publicity and destabilizes his standing among his base. In a sign that the Speaker recognizes his weak hand, the House vote has been put off until Thursday, so I can't say things are looking too bright for the poor guy. If the Tea Party even had one iota of interest constructive governance, they would stand behind the Republican leadership right now, hand themselves a victory, and cut their losses. But these people don't know how to quit while they're ahead. If they actually cared about leveraging their votes for policy, they would have agreed weeks ago to the grand bargain that Obama had been crafting with Boehner. Instead, they gave up their best opportunity for entitlement reforms in order to protect tax breaks for oil companies and a porous tax code for the rich. They torpedoed their own flagship just to make a point. And they'll continue this predictable holding pattern because their zealotry has reduced them to automatons.

The Democrats will prevail because they're playing strategically against people whose most salient dynamic is their lack of dynamism.

Debt limit negotiations

Boehner's talks with Reid are the latest round of efforts to end up collapsing over insurmountable roadblocks. But by making such a big show of quitting the negotiating table, the two party's camps are upping in the ante in a classic game of brinksmanship over who will take the blame for default. It's no accident that both have followed this same pattern throughout because it's scripted.

In fact, Reid reportedly didn't back out of the talks until after being summoned to the White House, where the Senate Majority Leader presumably conferred with Obama and decided to amplify the White House's narrative that Republicans are being intransigent.

And what will happen when markets reopen to the increasingly jittery investors tomorrow? The Republicans may see their resolve tested when the consequences become tangible

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Best (Worst) Nicknames in Politics

"Mean" Jean Schmidt (R-OH) was elected to Congress in 2005 after defeating Democrat and Iraq War vet Paul Hackett. Perhaps to bolster her (K) Street cred as an inveterate enemy of our nation's warriors, she took to the House floor mere months into her term to accuse longtime Congressman John Murtha of cowardice. Unfortunately for Mean Jean, not only was Jack Murtha a respected legislator, but was also a decorated marine and hero of the Vietnam War. Murtha had previously come out strongly against the disastrous occupation of Iraq, and the hapless Congresswoman from Ohio, in blissful ignorance of Murtha's military service, put on her best scowl and waxed philosophical, saying: "cowards cut and run, marines never do."