Speaker of the House John Boehner will have proven himself an adept community organizer if his debt ceiling bill gets through the House today. Since there is no alternative piece of legislation pending in either house of Congress, this bill is all that stands between us and default.
Thomas Sowell hails Boehner’s achievements in the debt ceiling crisis on Investors Business Daily:
Many of us never thought that the Republicans would hold tough long enough to get President Obama and the Democrats to agree to a budget deal that does not include raising income tax rates. But they did – and Speaker of the House John Boehner no doubt desires much of the credit for that.
Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise….
Now that the Republicans seem to have gotten the Democrats off their higher taxes kick, the question is whether a minority of the House Republicans will refuse to pass the Boehner legislation that could lead to a deal that will spare the country a major economic disruption and spare the Republicans from losing the 2012 elections by being blamed – rightly or wrongly – for the disruptions.
Is the Boehner legislation the best legislation possible? Of course not! You don’t get your heart’s desire when you control only one house of Congress and face a presidential veto.
The most basic fact of life is that we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available.
Boehner crafted the legislation after it became clear that detention hall-style “negotiations” with the real community organizer were going nowhere. Jennifer Rubin (who seems to have the best Republican sources in Washington these days) lists ten things passage of the Boehner bill would accomplish.
If the bill passed the Senate and was signed into law, it would resolve the current crisis immediately and in a way that puts the country on the road to fiscal sanity. Rubin points out that the House GOP freshmen would have done its job without violating their pledge not to raise taxes, something the administration desperately wanted them to do. It would also prove that the tea party is capable of governing and that divisions in the GOP have been vastly exaggerated.