The House Vote
by digby
Wow. This is a great way to make this vote for The Deal a nearly sacred act:
@Rep_Giffords Gabrielle has returned to Washington to support a bipartisan bill to prevent economic crisis. Turn on C-SPAN now
Giffords being there adds a poignancy to the whole thing that will take the sting out of the horror. I don’t know whose idea it was, but it’s very clever.
The good/bad news is that the bill is so bad that Republicans wanted to take credit for it so they didn’t make the Dems do their dirty work for them and pass the bill so at least the whole caucus isn’t on the hook. That was the final ignominy that I’d been predicting and I’m glad, for their sake, to be wrong. A few Democrats were allowed to maintain some shred of their integrity so that’s good. On the other hand, if they’d all said no, we’d be looking at a different picture right now…
And they could have — Biden told them earlier that the president would be willing to use the 14th amendment if they couldn’t get it done.(Of course Representative Giffords returning for the purpose of supporting the bill would have made them look churlish…) Too bad. It would have been quite the fireworks.
On the other hand, Giffords looks well and everyone seemed genuinely happy to see her and have something positive to cap off this hideous process. You can’t blame them.
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