Leverage
by digby
So Boehner laid down a “marker”:
House Speaker John A. Boehner said Monday that Republicans wanted trillions in budget cuts in exchange for their vote to increase the nation’s borrowing limit and avoid default, adopting a hard line on the party’s position in a speech before major players on Wall Street.
Boehner told the Economic Club of New York that his party wanted specific spending cuts — not future targets that would trigger spending reductions or revenue increases, as President Obama has proposed.
Laying down a marker on the eve of new budget negotiations, the Ohio Republican also said he wanted the amount of the cuts to exceed any increase in the nation’s borrowing limit, a demand that probably would mean new spending reductions of $2 trillion or more — many times higher than the $38 billion in cuts approved last month in the 2011 budget.
At the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, “Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) delivered a stern message that the debt ceiling will eventually have to be raised to keep the government from defaulting. But he also promised that Republicans will ‘use the leverage’ they have to enact at least some of their spending-reduction goals. ‘It’s a leverage moment for Republicans,’ Cantor said in an interview Friday. ‘The president needs us. There are things we were elected to do. Let’s accomplish those if the president needs us to clean up the old mess.'”
All the furrowed browed gasbags are speaking in hushed tones, contemplating the scale of cuts necessary to meet Boehner’s “demands.” It’s fairly well acknowledged that he will probably not get everything he wants and that he might be talking about a longer time frame than just the next two years, but they are all pretty darned sure that he’s going to get quite a bit of what he wants — even as they also admit that the Republicans will definitely agree to raise the debt ceiling come what may. Nobody seems to see anything at all odd about any of this.
Picture this. The roles are reversed. The Democrats have the House and the Republicans have the Senate and the Presidency. The debt ceiling vote looms. And suppose the Democrats admitted publicly that they would, of course, agree to raise the debt ceiling but also insisted that the Republicans agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations by the same amount that would be borrowed. And under no circumstances would they agree to even a penny in spending cuts. And everyone in Washington and on Wall Street treats this absurd “marker” seriously.
I know. It’s unimaginable on every level.
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