"It's your friggin' deficit, Republicans. They were your 'wars of choice.' You created the deficit. You pay it down!"
Instead, we continue to allow them to do their obscene pole dance right out here, in plain view. Neither Boehner nor McConnell are looking good.
The New York Times reports on the meeting this morning at the White House.
...In his weekly address, Mr. Obama urged Republicans to accept additional new revenues — a key sticking point in the negotiations — as a way to balance the cuts he said were serious. ...
The Republican canned response was "no revenues."
In addition to the dollar-for-dollar demand, Republicans also say no plan can include tax increases, and the authors of the deal are likely to avoid anything that could be construed as such.
In addition, Democrats have made it clear they will not entertain the type of deep cuts in entitlement programs that the president was negotiating with Mr. Boehner without substantial new revenues accepted by Republicans, so Medicare and Social Security may be off the table in the new talks as well.
In weeks of negotiations, House and Senate members have identified more than $1 trillion in savings that they could agree on, including cuts in federal agency budgets, farm subsidies, federal pension benefits and Medicaid. Those are likely to be the foundation for cuts in a new plan.
And the financial community is saying a piecemeal agreement is just asking for worse trouble.
“The markets have made clear that a short-term extension is not sufficient and would result in very serious consequences,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House.
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Steve Benen has been reading Norm Ornstein's righteous blast at this 112th Congress -- this Congress has decided, simply, not to function.
The problem with the 112th isn’t a structural impediment; it’s the result of a radicalized Republican Party that has no use for compromise, evidence, or reason. We have a congressional GOP abandoning all institutional norms, pushing extremist policies, rejecting their own ideas if they enjoy Democratic support, and engaging in tactics that were once thought unthinkable from policymakers who put the nation’s needs first.
Is this the “Worst. Congress. Ever.” as the headline on Ornstein’s piece argues? After six months on the job, that seems extremely likely. Indeed, if this Congress deliberately causes a global economic catastrophe, the competition for the worst Congress ever will end quite quickly.
The 112th is bad, really bad. But they have a companion in their ranking.
... The public needs to understand that Congress, at an institutional level, doesn’t bear all of the blame. The stark raving mad Republican Party does.
Benen thinks our democracy may well be a failed experiment and I think there's a good chance he's right. That's a belief shared by some of the more percipient watchers of our Congress.
But there are other functioning democracies -- countries that really deserve to be proud. I'm willing to bet there'll be a raft of ex-pat Americans moving away from here and back into sanity. There is one last hope. It has its origins in myriad polls taken over the past several months. Congress in 2013 will probably have chucked most of its current incumbents. The next lot may be no better. Or they may turn out to be not stark raving mad.
