No Dealing On The Debt Ceiling, Part 43

The wingers have discovered that Obama has played them for fools and allowed themselves to be painted into a corner on the debt ceiling talks.  They're not happy about it at all.  John Podhoretz's reaction is typical, that Boehner leaving talks and doing an end run around the White House is all Obama's fault:

An enraged Barack Obama just took to the nation’s airwaves to announce his effort to strike a deal with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has fallen apart. Perhaps for the first time in American history, this president is literally using this press conference to create a financial panic over the weekend about the opening of the markets on Monday. He is warning of disaster on Monday. Clearly,  he wants to use this as leverage to frighten the GOP into passing the plan proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which will push the debt ceiling problem into 2013, but it’s still an entirely new and astonishingly reckless gambit.

Right.  Orange Julius walks away from talks, but somehow that's Obama's "astonishingly reckless gambit".   Look, the President did set a July 22 date on these talks, folks.  This was something he mentioned last month, and Republicans are not only gobsmacked that the President meant what he said, they're even more vexed by the fact he hasn't completely capitulated to their "Cut, Cap and Balance" nonsense which would mean a 25% across the board cut to all government programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

And let's not forget the fact that Orange Julius changed the deal himself and demanded the repeal of the health care reform law's individual mandate as a new condition.

As of Thursday, Obama and Boehner had been working on a grand bargain that would produce roughly $3 trillion in savings over 10 years, the officials confirmed. But talks broke down along three major differences: the two sides were $400 billion apart on taxes, Obama rejected a last minute demand from the GOP that the deal include a repeal of the individual mandate in healthcare reform, and the two sides were still haggling over a difference of $40 billion in cuts to Medicaid, according to the White House. 

The $400 billion in taxes and $40 billion in Medicaid cuts could have been negotiated, but the GOP demand to dismantle the heart of the ACA's cost-savings would have undone the entire package and they knew it.  The difference is as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out last night that Obama has won the battle of who appears to be reasonable in this fight.



So where to now? Ezra reminds us that there are still three options on the table:

At this point, there are three serious options on the table. A $4 trillion deal that includes some revenues, a $1 trillion-$2 trillion deal that’s all spending cuts but leaves much of the job until after the election, and a deal in which Republicans don’t come to a negotiated agreement with President Obama but they grant him the authority -- and let him take the blame -- for raising the debt ceiling. Those are our three options, and Congress needs to pick one. Time is running short.

Option four is the Fourteenth Option.  The White House doesn't want to go there at all but if the GOP will not break, it's the President's trump card.