This was the single most bizarre day I've observed in US politics since the beginning of the Florida recount in 2000. The events were so fast moving and changing that I didn't know from 1 hour to the next whether we were headed to a default or that a Senate compromise could prevail. As of Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning (10/16), it looks as though it has worked out for the Democrats. The game is up; Boehner has folded and will bend the knee to the Senate and White House; and Reid ended up in a better position than he was 24 hours ago. But the road to this point was like riding a roller coaster blindfolded.
On 10/14, Harry Reid had largely negotiated a deal with Mitch McConnell that would end this saga. However, a funny thing happened: Ted Cruz met with a bunch of House GOP tea party caucus members at a restaurant near the Capitol building known as the Tortilla Coast in plain view of the House majority whip Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy informed Boehner and that sent the House leadership into a frenzied panic. For whatever reason, Boehner felt threatened by that meeting and attempted to head off a tea party revolt by quickly and haphazardly re-engaging in the legislative process in the 11th hour (after being inactive for 4 days) to put together a bill that could get 218 votes from House Republicans. The idea was to get close to the Senate bill, but to throw in enough poison pills that Obama would be forced to accept in order to avoid a financial meltdown. Boehner contacted McConnell, Graham and McCain and pleaded with them for more time to get a bill through the House. McConnell gambled on Boehner, hoping that a House bill that was close enough to the Senate bill with poison pills would give him more leverage vs. Harry Reid. Both also thought Boehner's Speakership was at stake and wanted to give him another shot at getting a better deal for Republicans (note: not for the country).
During the course of the day, Boehner discussed and revised the bill several times to curry favor with the tea party caucus. Each time hope was offered and then dashed. The bill included a continuing resolution to re-open the government to Jan 15 and raise/extend the debt ceiling to Feb. 7, closely mirroring the Senate bill. It then added several conditions: no extraordinary measures for Treasury to manage debt obligations past the deadline (a non-starter for the WH); income verification; 2 year delay of the medical device tax; and the Vitter amendment (preventing all members of the executive/legislative branch and their staffs from receiving employer subsidies (the employer being the gov't) to go into the federal health exchange).
Harry Reid and the WH both issued "DOA" notices to the House, but the House remained unbowed. Boehner was insistent on upending the Senate negotiations at the 11th hour and McConnell was obliging. Boehner's plan was to pass a bill and leave town so that the Senate had to either take their bill or leave it. Tea party reps were so excited about the prospects of screwing the public and the Democrats 1 more time, they sang Amazing Grace to open their meetings.
So Reid stood down and waited. But then a funny thing happened: Boehner had a press conference where he said absolutely nothing, but Nancy Pelosi understood that Boehner didn't have the votes. Behind closed doors, one by one, the tea party reps protested many of the conditions. At one point tea party members argued against the medical device tax repeal. They dropped income verification. They had a lengthy argument over the scope of the Vitter amendment. Paul Ryan and others wanted to add measures against contraception into the bill. There was an absurd point in this dark comedy where the House bill had fewer conditions than the Senate bill and the tea party reps were the ones who were making the bill more Democratic friendly. They essentially had shut down the government for 2 weeks to give their staffs a pay cut (apparently $5000 per year). This went on for several hours.
By the end of the day, the death blow was dealt by the Heritage Foundation which issued a notice against the bill. Boehner then conceded that he didn't have the votes. He hadn't even done a formal whip count but members were coming into his office and telling him "no". His office said the following:
Everything quickly unraveled from there. By about 8 pm ET that evening, Boehner had folded his tent and the GOPers went to their favorite watering holes. Boehner confirmed that he would accept the Senate compromise bill. He even spoke with Nancy Pelosi about fast-tracking it by initiating a vote in the House first on the Reid-McConnell bill and limiting filibuster opportunities for people like Cruz and Senator Mike Lee.
So there you have it. Boehner raised the white flag and bent the knee. Harry Reid re-engaged with McConnell while Lindsay Graham shamelessly begged for mercy on the Senate floor. The Senate bill will reportedly now include the extraordinary measures available for Treasury so that the debt ceiling can effectively be extended into the summer if the GOP drags this out again. The re-insurance tax delay is also out of the Senate bill (optics w/unions were not good?). The end result has not been formally revealed yet, but it looks pretty much like the clean bills that the President has demanded for weeks.
The deal is not done yet, but assuming no more 11th hour issues, this is an unqualified victory for President Obama and the Democrats and an embarrassing, perhaps fatal efdeat (with respect to the 2014 elections) for the Republicans.
I didn't piece it all together until yesterday evening, but it seems to me that Ted Cruz and his friends at Heritage were just messing with Boehner to humiliate him. Cruz intentionally had that meeting at the Tortilla Coast so that the GOP leadership would catch wind of it and overreact. Every time Boehner offered a condition to placate them, they would mull it over, lead him on and reject it. Given that the House bill was looking so much like the Senate bill that the tea party claimed to detest, it tells me that this was not a serious endeavor on their part but rather an attempt to make Boehner and McConnell look foolish. It succeeded. Cruz, it seems, knew the Democrats were never going to allow any conditions so he saw the opportunity to stick the knife in Boehner's back. At this point, I doubt Boehner survives as Speaker. If he somehow manages to stay on because no one else wants the job, he is simply a powerless figurehead. Ted Cruz is more interested in uprooting the old GOP guard than he is in winning battles against Democrats (much like Newt Gingrich when he rose to power in the late 80s and early 90s). He is a dangerous man to be sure.
Paul Ryan never had Boehner's back through this whole saga. He also weakened Boehner's position mightily. For once, Boehner finally recognized the obvious and will now facilitate passage of a bill that will have mostly Democratic votes.
We'll see where the story takes us from here.