Pick Your Poison, Name Your Price

We're to the point where we have articles about what the House GOP will try to extort from the President in exchange for not collapsing our government, our economy, and our country, and those articles are written as standard operating political procedure for congressional Republicans.

Conservatives in the GOP conference say they are evaluating debt-ceiling proposals against a deal they struck with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his lieutenants during the annual retreat in January. That deal says increases in the debt ceiling will only come about once debt-reducing laws are enacted, they said.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) has discussed developing a plan that would fast-track a rewrite of the tax code and tie it to raising the debt ceiling over multiple stages.

“That would be a real tough sell for me because that’s not the deal,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said. “It was tax reform would be tied to the debt ceiling. That doesn’t mean the House passes tax reform. It means we get tax reform.”

Republicans expect 100% of what they want and the economy suffers trillions in damage from supply-side idiocy and austerity hysteria, or else they force a default and...the economy suffers trillions in damage.

This is where we are right now, and this is apparently completely acceptable as the new political normal.  It's also Obama's fault for not being nice enough to Republicans who fully expect to not have to compromise, ever.

Amazing and depressing at the same time.  No wonder everything is broken.