I’m tempted to make an old Mel Brooks joke from History of the World. “Revolting? No, kidding. They stink on ice!” But more seriously. Pete King says he has 25 GOP House moderates who are going to vote ‘no’ on the Boehner/Tea Party defund Obamacare plan. Even he says he can’t be certain whether the 25 won’t buckle when the full pressure comes to bear. But it’s potentially a stunning and for Boehner devastating turn of events. If you really got 25 GOP ‘no’ votes and the Dems stayed united, which seems highly likely, the bill would go down to defeat.
Speaker Boehner’s office just released (a bit after 4 PM) a statement, probably the last before the shutdown kicks in, making what amounts to their final argument for shutting down the government.
“We’ve spent the last hour and a half meeting with our Members. And it’s pretty clear that what our Members want is fairness for the American people. The president provided a one year delay of the employer mandate. He’s provided exceptions for unions and others. There’s even exceptions for Members of Congress. We believe that everyone should be treated fairly. So we’re going to move here in the next several hours to take the Senate bill, add to it a one year delay of the individual mandate on the American people. And get rid of the exemption for Members of Congress. It’s a matter of fairness for all Americans.”
In final outburst, House GOP votes for double secret shutdown.
Reports coming in that some House Republicans are defecting from the latest, 11th-hour anti-Obamacare temporary spending bill because it doesn’t go far enough.
It can’t be reiterated often enough: If John Boehner puts a temporary spending bill on the House floor, without any anti-Obamacare stunts in it, it would pass.
He can do it today and avoid a shutdown, or he can do it in a few days or weeks and end a shutdown. It’s up to him.
Senate rebuffs House’s anti-Obamacare temporary spending bill. The final vote was 54-46.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) exasperated with House Tea Partiers “giddy” over impending shutdown.
Tea Partier Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT): “I don’t care what John McCain thinks” about shutting down the government over Obamacare. Video.
Sen. Collins denounces GOP Obamacare strategy.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on impending shutdown: “We’ve very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.”
TPM Reader JB picks up the thread on cracked parties and decapitated leaderships …
About your post this evening…it goes back just a couple of years, to the last government shutdown crisis in 2011, and I don’t think that’s far enough to understand what’s happened to the Republican Party, or at least to the GOP in Congress.
Remember that up to the beginning of 2007 the Republicans had not only the White House but majorities in both houses of Congress. They’d held them for some time. They had the power to set the agenda for the country, for several years, and then they lost it.