N.Y. TIMES
Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions. The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7. Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it.
The result of the impasse that threatened the nation’s credit rating was a near total defeat for Republican conservatives, who had engineered the budget impasse as a way to strip the new health care law of funding even as registration for benefits opened Oct. 1 or, failing that, to win delays in putting the program into place.
The shutdown sent Republican poll ratings plunging, cost the government billions of dollars and damaged the nation’s international credibility. Mr. Obama refused to compromise, leaving Republican leaders to beg him to talk, and to fulminate when he refused.
Under the agreement to reopen the government, the House and Senate are directed to hold talks and reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade. Mr. Obama said consistently through the standoff that he was willing to have a wide-ranging budget negotiation once the government was reopened and the debt limit raised.
Mr. Boehner and his leadership team had long felt that they needed to allow their restive conference to pitch a battle over the president’s health care law, a fight that had been brewing almost since the law was passed in 2010. Now, they hope the fever has broken, and they can negotiate on issues where they think they have the upper hand, like spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs.
not be at loggerheads again by mid-January, and there is deep skepticism in both parties that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who will lead the budget negotiations, can bridge the chasm between them.
Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (L) and Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray will co-chair a new joint budget committee conference charged with finding a budget and spending solution by Dec. 13
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who was instrumental in ending the crisis, stressed that under the deal he had negotiated with the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the across-the-board budget cuts [the sequester cuts] extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown remained in place over the objections of some Democrats, a slim reed that not even he claimed as a significant victory.
For Mr. Boehner, who had failed to unite his conference around a workable plan, Wednesday’s decision to take up the Senate bill proved surprisingly free of conflict. Hard-line Republican lawmakers largely rallied around the speaker. Mr. Boehner, they said, ...his conference found itself divided among three conflicting factions: moderate Republicans who were simply eager to reopen the government; those who opposed a provision that would have made members of Congress, White House officials and their staffs ineligible for government contributions to their health insurance on the new exchanges; and conservatives who felt the proposal did not go far enough in dismantling the health care law.
Conservatives in the House also remained skeptical that they would gain the upper hand in the near future. [They] said that with the president still unwilling to negotiate in good faith, he thought it was unlikely that Republicans would extract many concessions in any upcoming conference over the budget between the House and the Senate.
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An aide brings a cart stacked with pizza to the office of Speaker John Boehner
GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST
Dems [hope]that the closer to the 2014 elections we get, the harder it will be for Republicans to stage another debt ceiling hostage crisis.
Democrats don’t want such a crisis. They would prefer that Republicans simply agree to extend the debt limit cleanly. But by pushing this [early] into the 2014 election season, they are giving themselves a kind of insurance policy that guarantees that if Republicans do stage another debt limit crisis, Republicans will pay a serious political price for it.
On the one hand, you’d think that this arrangement simply guarantees that the debt limit will hang over the next talks, meaning it will give Republicans leverage. ... But Democrats ...believe Republicans will have capitulated on the debt limit twice in a row — this time, and earlier this year — and that the political fallout from the current crisis has been so bad for Republicans that party establishment types will be eager to avoid the same thing happening again [in] 2014.
It’s true that those who will try to force another debt ceiling crisis are Tea Party conservatives who don’t much care about the overall political health of the GOP. But as this Democratic aide explains to me, this is precisely the point: More pressure from the right for yet another debt limit crisis close to the election will be even worse for the GOP, because it could again divide the party and potentially force 2014 GOP candidates (particularly those involved in primaries) to adopt an extreme position, damaging them for general elections.
“The effect of this fight has been to destroy the Republican brand and put their 2014 candidates behind the eight ball,” the aide tells me. “We are not trying to bait them into another fight. We’d rather put it past the election. But it’s really up to them. If they want to recommit political suicide [eight] months before an election, that’s going to be their choice. We’re going to make sure that if this happens it has real consequences for them.”
And so, Dems are hoping that Republican leaders will have even more of an incentive next time to squash any demands from the right for another default hostage crisis. In this scenario, Dems effectively neutralize the debt limit over the long term, in exchange for accepting sequester level spending into December (only one month longer than under a “clean CR,” which Dems were already prepared to accept). If that worked, it wouldn’t be a bad outcome. Or, if the debt limit isn’t neutralized and Republicans do stage another hostage crisis, the GOP again would devolve into chaos, again underscoring the party’s addiction to destructive, intransigent, crisis-to-crisis governing with only months before Election Day 2014.
That’s the idea, anyway.
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WASHINGTON POST
....despite what most see as a debacle for Republicans, a core group of conservatives insisted Tuesday that they are winning their battle to force concessions from Democrats on fiscal issues.
The president, they say, has been forced into a negotiation, even though he has said he will cede nothing in exchange for opening the government and raising the debt ceiling. The nation’s attention has been focused on problems with the health-care law. And, they say, making Boehner move to the right is itself a victory.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said conservatives have succeeded in exposing problems with the health-care law.
“Oh my gosh, we’ve lit up Obamacare for the whole nation,” he said, describing what his wing of the party had won in the shutdown. “Look, the rollout was atrocious, this is a fundamentally flawed plan, and we have made it crystal-clear to the American public that we stand with them on Obamacare.”
That attitude illustrated a split within the GOP that has only grown more profound in the days since the shutdown started: Hard-liners are sure that their position is gaining strength, while moderates and a number of Republican leaders counter that the party has experienced an epic collapse.
“We didn’t get anything. This has been a total waste of time,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), one of the most consistent critics of his party’s most conservative members.
MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST
This is a sad and sickening spectacle,...Today, we have a clavern of sociopaths who know nothing of honor, and we have no easy way to stop them. Except at the ballot box. Except that they’ve rigged that, too, with their House districts. They’ve rigged the whole game so that they light the match and then point at President Obama and shout: “Look! Fire!”
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This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren’t going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren’t suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren’t going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn’t you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will.