@ miguel cervantes:
TARP wasn't meant to fix 50 years of economic mismanagement or prevent the stock exchanges from pricing it in. It was meant to help prevent a total meltdown, somewhat like the auto bailouts. Don't know what you think the rest has to do with the main topic - maybe in the same fantasy discourse where TARP and the bailouts were pure Obama policy, and the national debt is mainly an Obama creation.
@ fuster:
I'm sympathetic to your point, though the alternative history is unknowable, of course.
However, you should go read the comment threads at HotAir or National Review to remind yourself about the alternative universe in which the conservative base resides. Don Miguel's snapshots aren't can't deliver the full 3-D ultracrepidarian phantasmagoria.
I think there’s enough of them, that if they simply say no to everything, nothing can pass.
Only if discipline holds. Last time around, long before the Tea Party existed, the cons voted TARP down the first time. It wasn't until the markets started crashing that they could be persuaded to vote as the sitting president, the nominee, and what's-her-name, the VP candidate, were asking.
So, to make the state of play more clear: The TPers DON'T seem at the moment to be placing a high value on team play, since Boehner is supposedly having trouble getting the votes for his current bill. The non-TP Rs don't seem yet to have taken rejection by the TP as an excuse to break party ranks. Which again goes to this whole thing as a test of the R party. Boehner might have been able to pass some version of the Grand Compromise with Dem votes, but it was generally held that it would destroy his speakership (i.e., radically split the Rs).
@ bob:
Part of the process is finding out how many of the House Rs are true believing revolutionaries of the type you describe, and how many of them are going along for the ride - i.e., because they're Rs and it's their team. At some point, if not already beneath the surface, it may become a crisis for the "relative moderates": The long-time members, the leadership, etc., everyone who kind of half-believes the Tea Party rhetoric and up to the crisis point, places a very high value on team unity, even if they disagree with the strategy.
If they stick with the team and the team stays stuck on the TP strategy, then we go back to finding out just how bad the default crisis is and just how happy everyone in the rest of the world is with having the TP running things.
@ bob:
If there's a majority of House Rs who'd rather "see what happens" - including the possibility of 1) calamity, 2) assertion of Prez authority, and 3) destruction of the R Party, then, yes, doing nothing more but go on TV and claim everything bad is O's fault would be their best option.
Most grown-up Rs, and nearly 100% of the Rs' big money backers, don't like that plan.
Because doing nothing more means default crisis and default crisis turns to true real world crisis - presumably some roiling calamity that McConnell and Boehner and other Republicans who care about the future of the party realize, according to polls, would be rightly blamed on them. Clinton-Gingrich Government shutdown multiplied by the 2008 financial crisis... but worse.
It's Congress' responsibility to raise the ceiling... OR it may at some point become Obama's prerogative and responsibility to assert executive authority via the 14th Amendment or other interpretations of the powers of the presidency.
miguel cervantes wrote:
Bullshit.
@ miguel cervantes:
TARP wasn't meant to fix 50 years of economic mismanagement or prevent the stock exchanges from pricing it in. It was meant to help prevent a total meltdown, somewhat like the auto bailouts. Don't know what you think the rest has to do with the main topic - maybe in the same fantasy discourse where TARP and the bailouts were pure Obama policy, and the national debt is mainly an Obama creation.
@ fuster:
I'm sympathetic to your point, though the alternative history is unknowable, of course.
However, you should go read the comment threads at HotAir or National Review to remind yourself about the alternative universe in which the conservative base resides. Don Miguel's snapshots aren't can't deliver the full 3-D ultracrepidarian phantasmagoria.
bob wrote:
Only if discipline holds. Last time around, long before the Tea Party existed, the cons voted TARP down the first time. It wasn't until the markets started crashing that they could be persuaded to vote as the sitting president, the nominee, and what's-her-name, the VP candidate, were asking.
So, to make the state of play more clear: The TPers DON'T seem at the moment to be placing a high value on team play, since Boehner is supposedly having trouble getting the votes for his current bill. The non-TP Rs don't seem yet to have taken rejection by the TP as an excuse to break party ranks. Which again goes to this whole thing as a test of the R party. Boehner might have been able to pass some version of the Grand Compromise with Dem votes, but it was generally held that it would destroy his speakership (i.e., radically split the Rs).
@ bob:
Part of the process is finding out how many of the House Rs are true believing revolutionaries of the type you describe, and how many of them are going along for the ride - i.e., because they're Rs and it's their team. At some point, if not already beneath the surface, it may become a crisis for the "relative moderates": The long-time members, the leadership, etc., everyone who kind of half-believes the Tea Party rhetoric and up to the crisis point, places a very high value on team unity, even if they disagree with the strategy.
If they stick with the team and the team stays stuck on the TP strategy, then we go back to finding out just how bad the default crisis is and just how happy everyone in the rest of the world is with having the TP running things.
... but there are more than a few hardcore progs and lefties who think it's like the best idea ever.
@ bob:
If there's a majority of House Rs who'd rather "see what happens" - including the possibility of 1) calamity, 2) assertion of Prez authority, and 3) destruction of the R Party, then, yes, doing nothing more but go on TV and claim everything bad is O's fault would be their best option.
Most grown-up Rs, and nearly 100% of the Rs' big money backers, don't like that plan.
Because doing nothing more means default crisis and default crisis turns to true real world crisis - presumably some roiling calamity that McConnell and Boehner and other Republicans who care about the future of the party realize, according to polls, would be rightly blamed on them. Clinton-Gingrich Government shutdown multiplied by the 2008 financial crisis... but worse.
It's Congress' responsibility to raise the ceiling... OR it may at some point become Obama's prerogative and responsibility to assert executive authority via the 14th Amendment or other interpretations of the powers of the presidency.
See new RecBrow post for Dem thinking.