My debt limit nightmare scenario goes something like this: Nothing of any substance happens for the next month or so. Then, a few days before the government’s borrowing authority lapses, House Republicans pass legislation pairing deep spending cuts — some specific, some asterisked — with a debt limit increase. The Senate, gridlocked by filibuster, can’t pass a clean debt limit bill, so instead they pass nothing. Republicans skip town claiming they’ve done their job, leaving Democrats to choose between surrender and economic havoc.
Republicans used the same trick (or tried to) repeatedly in 2011 and 2012 as a negotiating tactic. But if Democrats are serious about not negotiating for a debt limit increase, then the “tactic” amounts to lighting a very short fuse and running for the hills.
But thanks to Karl Rove I’m beginning to doubt Republicans can get it together enough to pull this off. Read More
Chris Christie is one of the GOP governors who hasn’t yet decided whether to accept the Medicaid expansion that is a big part of Obamacare. It sets up a real political and policy conundrum for Christie. You might even call it a delicious conundrum were the stakes not so high for low income New Jersey residents in need of health care. Here’s TPM Reader LM: Read More
Two choice nuggets from Eli Lake’s piece this morning on the Hagel nomination.
The first is a Karl Rove classic: a personal anecdote meant to suggest that Hagel isn’t nobly independent but merely unpredictable and self-serving. A stabbed in the back vignette that cuts through the highfalutin foreign policy debate between neoconservatives and realists and gets to the “real” visceral issue of character. Read More
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in epic row on their show this morning over Obama’s record of appointing women to his cabinet. Watch.
One of the quandaries right now for GOP governors is whether to accept the Medicaid expansion in their states that the Affordable Care Act provides. It’s basically free money from the federal government, but it’s politically toxic for conservatives.
Yesterday, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez became just the second GOP governor to accept the Medicaid expansion. Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Rick Scott stands accused of exaggerating the costs of the expansion to his state as a way of justifying rejecting the money. On the defensive, his administration has agreed to recalculate the cost estimates.
Linda Greenhouse on Robert Bork and his post-nomination lurch into the “apocalyptic rhetoric that defined his subsequent writing and speeches.”
Junior Seau was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he took his own life last year.
The winning entries among 22,000 images from 150 countries in National Geographic’s annual photo contest.
What do you expect to happen when the debt limit fight hits the deadline in mid-February. We’re discussing that question right now at TPMPrime. Join us.
TPM Reader MA captures a lot of my sense of where New York City is right now …
It’s been 20 years since Giuliani was first elected mayor, and 12 years since Bloomberg bought his first mayoral contest. Twenty years of white Republican mayors – mayors that have been liberal on some social issues but very much aligned with Wall Street and the city’s wealthy – in a bright blue, largely blue-collar and majority non-white city. And they’ve held power in large measure by leveraging white anxieties, from Bay Ridge to Borough Park to the Upper East Side, and the memory of the chaos of the ’70s and ’80s (okay, Bloomberg’s buying off every political professional in the city and flooding the mediaverse with advertising spend probably didn’t hurt him any either).