GOP Debt Ceiling Plan to Be 'Last One Standing' - to Obama's Delight

Last updated: 07/27/2011 02:28:59


By Lori Price
legitgov.org

July 26, 2011

House Speaker John Boehner's plan will likely be the 'last one standing' -- one that President Obama must accept or face 'default' aka the pseudo-crisis created by and for the GOP -- and that is exactly the scenario he wants. Seeking political cover, Obama said he would veto earlier austere Boehner (R-OH) plans. That was never his actual intention, as he could have exposed the hypocrisy of the debt-ceiling self-generated crisis and invoked the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. The stage is set for Obama to implement the Tea Party-pwned GOP plan and appear to be the 'adult in the room.'

Obama failed to assert the fact that Republicans voted to increase the debt ceiling *seven times* under unelected George W. Bush. At the time, they referred to their vote on the Sunday talk show circuit as 'routine house-keeping.' Dick Cheney also said 'deficits don't matter,' as he and the GOP were exploding them for the sole benefit of US corpora-terrorists. In addition to unfunded wars-for-oil, the unfunded (Homeland) security state, and the unfunded 'Leave No Every Child Behind' (so that we can privatize education), Bush and the GOP ushered in tsunami-sized deficits by over-funding the pharma-terrorists at every opportunity.

Remember Project Bioshield? 'As part of Project Bioshield, the Department of Health and Human Services has been allocated $5.6 billion to build up the Strategic National Stockpile with drugs, vaccines and therapies to prepare for the threat of terrorist attacks.' (See: Nuke attack drug contracts up for grabs --Feds to tap drug makers for stockpiles against radiation poisoning. By Aarron Smith 23 Sep 2005.) Another wasted $5.6 billion in giveaways to the pharma-terrorists after the anthrax attacks and avian flu scares created by Fort Detrick, etc.

Under Bush/Cheney, the pharma-terrorists were going to get their extra taxpayer billions by starving the US government of the right to bargain for Medicare drugs and lower costs. In fact, the GOP-run congress 'threatened its own' and kept the vote open against House rules for nearly three additional hours to ram through Bush's big pharma giveaway aka the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003.

In Republican Deficit Hypocrisy - Remember the Medicare drug benefit?, Bruce Bartlett described what happened when Republicans were determined to pass the 'budget-busting drug bill' in an editorial for Forbes, published 20 Nov 2009:

The vote was kept open for almost three hours while the House Republican leadership brought massive pressure to bear on the handful of principled Republicans who had the nerve to put country ahead of party. The leadership even froze the C-SPAN cameras so that no one outside the House chamber could see what was going on.

Among those congressmen strenuously pressed to change their vote was Nick Smith, R-Mich., who later charged that several members of Congress attempted to virtually bribe him, by promising to ensure that his son got his seat when he retired if he voted for the drug bill...

Eventually, the arm-twisting got three Republicans to switch their votes from nay to yea... Three Democrats also switched from nay to yea and two Republicans switched from yea to nay, for a final vote of 220 to 215. In the end, only 25 Republicans voted against the budget-busting drug bill. (All but 16 Democrats voted no.)

As an aside, can anyone *imagine* what would have happened if the Democratic House leadership froze C-SPAN cameras and kept voting open an extra three hours? The trial-by-Tea Party, conviction, execution, and viral YouTube replay of same would have been all wrapped up in about five hours. But I digress.

Recalling the classic line uttered by Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network: 'If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.' If Barack Obama wanted the public option, there would have been a public option. Obama would have invoked the 'moral imperative of health care for all' by mustering his soaring rhetorical skills and worked tireless for same. Obama chose federalized RomneyCare instead of the public option, even though candidate Obama campaigned for single-payer health care. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts, even though candidate Obama campaigned to allow them to sunset in 2010. Again, he allowed the GOP to control the narrative and in the final hours, pretended to cave when extending the Bush tax cuts was never problematic to him. If Obama wanted the Bush tax cuts to sunset, the would have been allowed to sunset.

The Democratic plan is to pass the Republican plan. They are just using different covers on the same playbook. Yes, some Democrats have fought for the people and continue to fight. But they are continually pushed to the right and/or are overtaken by the Democratic majority. Barack Obama was 'allowed' to win in 2008 so that he could turn over the rest of the U.S. Treasury to the Wall Street class and to pardon the Bush cabal for its war crimes. (War crimes, by the way, that continue in the Obama Administration.) Obama has taken the US into more covert and overt wars than did Bush and will have destroyed the middle class, an act even George W. Bush could not complete. Truly, mission accomplished!