Shutdown Countdown, Part 12

Orange Julius:  Professional Hostage?  Ezra Klein muses:

The math of a possible budget deal isn’t particularly hard. If John Boehner can’t get enough Republicans, he can always move to the left and get some Democrats. As my colleague Paul Kane reports, there’ve been some preliminary feelers from GOP leadership looking into doing just that. Plenty of Blue Dogs would be happy to help out, and the Republican leadership could get a spending bill with cuts equal to their initial $30 billion proposal. By any normal accounting, that’d be a win. It’d be as if House Democrats had managed to send their first health-care bill, complete with public option, sailing through the Senate in order to head off a singe-payer proposal favored by the party’s liberal wing. What the arithmetic leaves out, however, is Eric Cantor.

Whether you call it the Tea Party or not, the hardline of the modern Republican Party has demonstrated its willingness and skill at deposing incumbent Republicans who are too willing to compromise with the other side. Deposing the Speaker of the House, however, is hard. But it’s a bit less hard if you have another option waiting in the wings. An option like Eric Cantor. As David Rogers and Jake Sherman note, Cantor has been separating himself from Boehner’s “I’m not going to put any options on the table or take any options off the table” and making it clear that he both opposes a short-term CR and hasn’t been informed about a range of compromise discussions. It’s an odd public stance for the Majority Leader to take. But it’s right in line with a Republican Party where the conservative caucus has promised to counter Paul Ryan’s budget with an even-more conservative document -- even though no one has yet seen Ryan’s budget!

In fact the WIN THE MORNING Village crew is all over this "Will Cantor go after Boehner as Speaker?" crap this morning, and I'm laughing my head off.  It's such crap.

I believe that garbage as far as Eric Cantor can throw me.  Absolutely this is "bad cop, insane cop trying to kill me in my sleep" being played for all to see.

This is the point where Orange Julius goes to Blue Dog Dems and says "I can't control Eric Cantor and the Tea Party anymore.  The only way we're going to get out of this without a shutdown is if you guys can help me out here and give me enough cuts to save my neck.  You'll be heroes, too...defying your party to reach across the aisle, the press will love it.  Otherwise, well, who do you think's going to be blamed here?  You'd better act fast, deal's only on the table for so long..."

And the Dems will fall for it.  At this point the worst Orange Julius can do is getting his initial $30 billion in cuts.  The Dems have already given up that much.  And the way Cantor's taking Alka-Seltzer tablets and using them to fake frothing at the mouth, he's going to get a lot more.

Folks, this is kabuki at its finest.  Dems are being played, Village is being played, US taxpayers are being played.  The odds of this being the final push for Republicans to get what they want (and then move on to getting even more long-term concessions in the debt ceiling bill) are higher right now than the odds of a shutdown.

Count on it.