The Critical Next 48 Hours

As we near Thursday's debt ceiling cliff, the Senate is apparently close to a deal on re-opening the Government through January 15 and extending the debt ceiling to February 7.  The Rethuglicans would be required to join a Senate-House conference on the FY 2014 budget (something the Dems have been asking for since last spring), and there's some slim hope that the sequester numbers will yield to something more fair to working families.  As for the debt ceiling, the Teathuglican radicals have so alienated traditional Rethug backers like the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street that they may not want to make the February 7 date another Waterloo for themselves.  A better path would have been to extend the debt ceiling date through the end of the fiscal year (September 30) and dare the wingnuts to play with it weeks before the elections.  Here's the New York Times' editorial on the state of play, and their wrap-up:

"Assuming the Senate reaches a deal on Tuesday, it would only go into effect if Speaker John Boehner allows it to go to a vote in the House. If he continues to cater to the Tea Party wing of his caucus, piling on new demands, the delay could be catastrophic — a 'rapidly spreading fatal disease,' as the co-chief executive of Deutsche Bank put it. The time to stop it has arrived."

Indeed.

Letters We Wish We'd Written - Historical Analogy Dept.

In today's once-great Washington Post  Bezos Bugle:

Regarding the Sept. 23 article “Shutdown standoff shows no sign of easing”:

“We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten . . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us.” So said Abraham Lincoln in 1860 following his victory in the presidential election.

Southern states were demanding a “compromise” on slavery in exchange for not seceding from the union. However, their proposed “compromise” required that the victorious party make all the concessions to ensure the continuation of the institution of slavery. We just completed an election in 2012 in which Democrats won the White House, the Senate and a majority of the popular vote in the House “on principles fairly stated to the people,” yet the Republicans (a large percentage of them Southerners) threaten to “break up” the government (through defunding and defaulting on debt) unless the victors surrender to the losers. Has anything changed in 150 years?
 
Leonard Allen Jewler, Washington

The Rethugs' Next Hostage

Ezra Klein on the Rethuglican's threat to use the looming sequester cuts as leverage:

"This is the kind of perverse policy outcome that’s the consequence of the GOP’s no-tax pledge. They could get a deal from the Obama administration that would cut Medicare and Social Security and all the other spending Republicans want to cut so long as they’d also raise taxes. And they wouldn’t even have to raise tax rates — they could just get rid of loopholes and tax breaks in the code. Instead, they’re threatening to cut the spending they care most deeply about using an unreliable mechanism that was designed to be so objectionable that they’d never let it become law.

"But this is the corner they’ve backed themselves into. Having lost an election, and having tied themselves to a no-tax pledge, they’re so desperate for leverage, so desperate for a hostage they can actually shoot, that they’re willing to point the gun at their own head and threaten to pull the trigger." (our emphasis)

To which we can only say, "Go ahead. Make my day."