John Boehner today picked up his gun and pointed it right at the American economy.
House Speaker John Boehner passed up two opportunities Thursday to rule out bringing up a vote on legislation to extend middle income tax cuts, allowing the Bush tax cuts for top earners to expire. But he suggested that if the year ends without a broader agreement between himself and President Obama, he’ll use the debt limit to provoke a new round of budget negotiations.
snip
If Boehner’s forced to extend middle-income tax cuts only, it’s unlikely that Congress will raise the debt limit before the end of the year. That, he suggested, will allow him to reopen negotiations with Obama early next year.
“The debt limit ought to be used to bring fiscal sanity to Washington, DC,” he said.
TPM
This appears to be their plan:
Unlike with the fiscal cliff, Republicans have all the leverage when it comes to the debt limit. Today, Obama is perfectly willing to go over the fiscal cliff and blame the GOP for the resulting tax increases on the middle class. But when it comes to the debt limit, he does not have that luxury. He can’t default on our debt — the consequences are too catastrophic. So in the end he will cave.
Marc A. Thiessen, Opinion Columnist for WaPO:Republicans should stand and fight
Give us our way, even though we did not win the election, and destroy social security, medicare, and medicaid, or we'll shoot the hostage. We will destroy the American economy as much as we can.
This "tactic" is despicable. It borders on treason. Deliberate causing of an economic collapse for political gain.
And they will come back to it over and over again, as Grover Norquist recommends.
Republicans rely on the fact that Democrats are responsible.
President Obama has said that he will not negotiate under threat of a failure to extend the debt ceiling. Last week he said to the Business Roundtable:
I want to send a very clear message to people here: We are not going to play that game next year. If Congress in any way suggests that they’re going to tie negotiations to debt ceiling votes and take us to the brink of default once again as part of a budget negotiation — which, by the way, we had never done in our history until we did it last year — I will not play that game. Because we’ve got to break that habit before it starts.
WaPo: The GOP’s dangerous debt-ceiling gamble (quoting President Barack Obama)
According to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:
They’re almost religious about this: They believe they owe it to future generations to break the back of the idea that minority parties can and should play Russian roulette with the economy.
WaPo: The GOP’s dangerous debt-ceiling gamble
The end game is coming in February. Will Boehner's economic terrorism become an effective takeover of our nation's government or will we fight back?
We cannot appease the tyrant of the Republican House. America must make its stand against economic terrorism, here and now.
The damage that will occur by normalizing economic terrorist and appeasing these would-be-tyrants is greater than the damage to our economy by a quasi-default.
America can no longer be governed this way.
Republican economic terorism is more dangerous to this nation than any other issue we have faced in this century.
We must support the President in his refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling. No matter what the cost.