It's unseemly to take a certain level of joy in the dilemmas of others, but in the case of the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, Democrats have to be grinning from ear-to-ear.
Boehner, whom Matt Taibbi aptly dubbed "the ultimate five-tool insider," faces a series of choices in the run-up to the shut-down of the Federal government which run from bad to worse to a Tea Party-induced worser.
The Orange Man cannot apparently wrangle a deal on the Federal budget out his Tea Party jihadis.
That whacky band of assorted nuts and zealots ran on a platform of throwing a monkey wrench into the works of government. They are about to get their cockamamie constituents' fondest wish.
President Obama has met the Republicans' pain threshold for the 2011 fiscal year in terms of cuts to get the number in a place where Speaker Boehner has actually called for the number to be. His problem is that the number is not what his extremists in the GOP caucus want.
The sticking point is not the number which is usually the problem in Congressional budget negotiations. It is where the number comes from within the budget.
The Tea Party wants to re-engineer the government in their own image, by way of the Federal funding process. Instead of debating the merits of various bits of legislation, they want to defund government institutions, agencies, policies and programs as a back-door method of shutting out debate and opinion that weighs in positively by large swaths of the voting public on a number of programs from Medicare to Social Security to the Affordable Care Act.
The Tea Jihadis want to take a chain saw to the rest of government as well. They want all of the $4B in cuts which they propose to come from services and entitlements which they have railed against for the middle class and the working poor.
Congressman Paul Ryan, whose Byzantine understanding of the economy and government would be laughed out of Congress in any year where the Fox News whack-job vote was not actively being courted by the GOP, voices their positions best.
He put forth a budget plan this week that continues leaving the wealthiest 3% of Americans untouched, but takes a few million gallons of political napalm to the undercarriage holding up the Middle Class in this country.
The plan, as the Center for American Progress notes, is a gift to Wall Street. Ryan proposes privatizing Medicare, run by the same insurance companies that are screwing over millions of Americans with lifetime caps and pre-existing condition games, and who managed money so poorly during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
His plan calls for the abolition of Social Security, defunds and abolishes the Health Care reforms passed by Congress in 2009, takes a machete to education, and cuts out scores of programs that uphold public safety and commerce.
Have another BP oil spill? We're on our own, then. Or the states would have to eat billions in cleanups that the federal government now handles, at least in part, through FEMA.
I'm not sure what Mr. Ryan has in mind for a social safety net. Even the Catholic church, up to its ears in lawsuits for pedophilic priests, doesn't have the resources to run the poor houses and work houses of old that were the solution to people who fell through the holes in the loosely woven fabric of American society.
In a U.S. News & World report poll on the Ryan budget, 78.88% of the conservative-leaning publication's readers called the plan "awful," while about 14.85% said that the his reforms were necessary.
The Ryan plan is a dead-on-arrival proposal designed more to pander to the seething simpletons that have become the core of the Republican Party base, not to govern. Instead of doing something to concretely govern, particularly as action is needed within the next 24 hours on a federal budget that needed passage months ago, Tea Party members of Congress continue to pontificate and posture.
A government shut-down will not be pretty. Its effects will be profound not just on daily life, but on the Republican party.
On the practical side, agencies that monitor everything from inter-bank transfers that keep money and the stock market moving, to the importation of cars, to the licensing and control systems for our trains, planes, and trucks, to seniors who draw Social Security receiving their checks, will be shut down, causing tsunami-like ripples in the normal order of business.
Need money from an ATM? Good luck getting it. Like your banana in the morning with your cereal? Without the federal customs agents inspecting goods, they'll rot on the docks. Flying somewhere? Screeners from Homeland Security in the airports are federal employees. Lou Dobbs may even have to get out to the border with his trusty Winchester. The military is protected in the event of a shut-down, but INS, U.S. Customs, and the Border Patrol are only marginally protected.
Republicans talk a good game about their patriotism, but the patriotic keystone of our democracy has always been compromise.
In Russia or Iran, the majority party may get away with compromise being solely their agenda, but that is not the way that the game is played in the good ol' U.S. of A.
Mr. Boehner looked unhappy emerging from negotiations at the White House last night. He has good reason to be less cocky than usual. There are not a lot of wins for him at the moment.
If he bucks the Tea Party, he can get enough Democratic votes to pass the finance bill, but he effectively creates a three-party House as the Tea Party zealots will split off from the Representatives-of-the-Rich Party, your "classic" Republicans.
If he sticks with the Tea Party and lights the fuse of their cannon aimed down into the hold of the Ship of State, he is likely scuttle the GOP as well.
That is because, on the state GOP front, the radical Republican governors' march on organized labor is backfiring epically, establishing huge discontent in the 2012 voter base as Republicans touch the political live wire of labor union busting.
The Supreme Court election in Wisconsin is demonstrating that point. Challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who rivaled Claude Reins for being invisble, at least politically, just weeks ago, in her bid to become a sitting Supreme Court justice of her state, declared victory today with a scant lead of 204 votes out of more than 1.5M cast in a statewide off-year Supreme Court election.
The normal off-year, low-turnout judicial election turned from a walk in the park for sitting Wisconsin Justice David Prosser into a referendum on Governor Scott Walker's union-busting policies.
Win, lose or draw, the whole process has shown up the new Speaker as a straw man, a figurehead, a leader in name only. Mr. Boehner has not got the power to control his dissidents. He has, therefore, no real power as Speaker, unless he works with the Democrats to get the votes he needs.
Mr. Boehner is still lining up with the real power in his caucus, the Tea Party, even if it is killing him to do so. Hence his remark to George Stephanopoulos that there was "no daylight" between himself and the God's political holy warriors.
Yet Boehner knows that even limited success for the Tea Party on the budget means that every bill that he brings forward in this session of Congress that requires bipartisan support will result in months of stalemate and gridlock.
It's the well deserved yang to his yin of grinding the Pelosi House to a halt by creating continual gridlock for the Dems.
It must be hard for Boehner, being the permissive political parent, watching his Tea Party political toddlers put their foot on the gas as they scream gleefully down the alley towards that brick wall and electoral extinction in 2012.
President Obama, wisely, has not baited the Fox faithful into any reaction. It would be too easy to blame him for their melt-down.
No, simply by letting the Tea Party grind the Republican Party into internal stalemate, all the while being at the ready to strike a deal should Mr. Boehner regain control of his party's caucus, it leaves the President and the Democrats in a stronger position for 2012 to protect the middle class and the social safety net from such extremists.
My shiny two.