House Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) just announced there will be no vote tonight on the Boehner debt bill.
A remarkable turn of events. Simply no reason for Boehner to bring up his own bill if it was doomed to fail, and clearly it was.
Despite a lot of confident talk from Boehner and his leadership team, it appears they never had the votes.
But this is no ordinary failure of a whip operation. It’s not a shrug your shoulders moment. Yes, you win some and you lose some. But here we are on the brink of default, with the world economy in the balance, and we’ve spent an entire day or more now on a bill that is never going to pass the Senate, was never going to be signed by the President, and which we now know doesn’t even have the support of enough of the Speaker’s own party to pass.
To give you some idea where this is potentially headed, investors pulled billions out of money market funds today, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Nero fiddled. Tonight Congress nibbled — on takeout pizza, whiling away the hours as default loomed.
David Kurtz
David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.