Last Call For The Ransom Of Orange Chief

As any truly accomplished supervillain can tell you, villainy by committee never works, hence all the bad guys are monomaniacal tyrants and stuff.  The House GOP by comparison just looks like a bunch of dipsticks, because they can't even agree anymore on their demands for taking the country's economy hostage.

House Republicans are abandoning plans to link a debt ceiling increase to the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline or a repeal of the risk corridors provision in the Affordable Care Act, a GOP leadership aide confirmed to The Huffington Post.

"Following informal conversations with a broad range of members, it is clear we cannot get 218 Republican members to support a debt limit increase along with either Keystone or the insurance company bailout," the aide said. "We're exploring a range of other options."

While a formal offer had not been made in which a debt ceiling hike was tied to Keystone or Obamacare's risk corridors provision, those were two of the more popular proposals to emerge from a House Republican retreat last week. The latter was dealt a significant blow Tuesday when a Congressional Budget Office report found that a repeal of the risk corridors piece of Obamacare would actually increase the deficit by $8 billion over three years.

The big problem is Republicans by themselves can't pass a bill to raise the debt limit at all, and no Democrats are going to help them take the country's economy hostage and plunge us into a debt crisis.  What will happen is what always happens at this point:  the Senate will pass a clean debt ceiling hike, and Boehner will be forced to take a vote on it or be responsible for crushing the economy during an election year.  There will be enough Democrats and Republicans who do want a clean debt ceiling hike in the House to pass it, President Obama will sign it, and the Republicans get nothing.

Boehner also knows that if there's one thing that will get Obamacare off the front page, it's another government shutdown fight blamed on the GOP.  And yet all indications are by doing this, he's putting himself out of a job.

And I have no sympathy.