Don't Vote Tonight, Call Chicken Delight

++John Boehner can at least console himself that he is a more produtive speaker of the House than the Iraqi speaker of parliament. Boehner has passed 12 laws to date, the Iraqi speaker only 6. In contrast, Nancy Pelosi last term passed 254 laws. To be fair, it is estimated that Boehner will pass about 40 laws by the time his term expires. Still one of the worst records in the history of the United States.

++John Boehner told the House to go home tonight as he is still 26 votes short on his bill after vowing it would pass the House tonight.

++Even though John Boehner has been consulting Rush Limbaugh on the deficit ceiling plan, the Rushbo surprised this morning by urging House Republicans to vote against.

++Harry Reid was positively salivating at the prospect of the Boehner passing his bill tonight. He had kept the Senate around just to vote against it. All day long Harry Reid had b een promising the House that Boehner's bill was dead on arrival. So it probably was a disappointment he didn't get to shut it down tonight.

++The Boehner bill has gone back into re-write to appease the teabaggers. Red State claims they are adding a Balance Budget Amendment to the Constitution to the bill, precisely what Senator John McCain had warned against just yesterday. The other addition is to cut the funds for the Pell Grants because teabaggers believe it is welfare since minority students benefit from them. If anything the bill would become even more rightwing than it is.

++But teabaggers are expressing the concern that if they vote for Boehner than their constituents will be angry with them because it will never become law. A little late in the day when you consider that the teabaggers voted for the Ryan Plan that got rid of Medicare.

++But the good news as the economy goes off the cliff is that the House spent time naming a post office in Peoria, Illinois.

++Little attention has been paid to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops denunciation of the Boehner bill for making the poor pay an exorbitant amount in the budget cuts. In fact, Boehner's bill violates the rules of budget cutting that says that those programs protecting the most vulnerable must be preserved as a matter of law.

++The 14th Amendment has gained momentum in the debt ceiling argument. Bill Clinton met with President Obama advising him to invoke it. This is not unprecdented. Harry Truman once invoked it to raise the debt ceiling. From what I can tell, there seem to be several ways to do this by exceutive order. Paul Roberts, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote today that President Obama didn't have to go that fair. Apparently, in all those unitary executive rulings by the George W. Bush administration, the President is allowed to unilaterally declare an economic emergency and single-handedly do what he needs to do.

++The question facing Boehner is whether he can maintain the speakership if his bill goes down. Apparently, the conventional wisdom is he can last the term. But we face a government shutdown in September the way the House is acting because the continuing resolution on the budget will expire. And word is that Boehner doesn't want another deficit ceiling fight in his first term even though his bill calls for it. So if things are rough for the President, Boehner is the saddest tangerine as John Stewart said.

++The situation gets more bizarre as it unfolds. Boehner today said that he didn't care whether his bill would negatively affect the country's credit rating. "I have no control over that". Even though he had been warned several days before the bill was first posted about the fact.

++Freshmen GOP tweets today were sort of sad. It was clear they didn't even know how something became law. It was only throughout the day that it became clear to them that the House bill had no chance to become law. So the idea that this would force the Senate and the President's hand--the argument being used by Boehner and Cantor--rang hollow and they began to back away.

++I believe that the teabaggers honestly believe when they passed the Ryan Plan, the Cut, Cap and Balance bill that they had actually passed a law. They sincerely don;t know how the system works.

++Meanwhile Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell are quietly drafting a bill to raise the debt ceiling until the next presidential term with an attempt to merge Boehner and Reid's approaches.