I agree with Joan Walsh:

President Obama and the Democrats certainly deserve enormous credit for hanging tough as long as they have. In the Senate deal, they “win” a relatively short time frame to have to live with the budget cuts imposed by the awful sequester deal. Republicans “win” a shorter extension of the debt ceiling than Democrats want. Additionally, by most accounts, Republicans would get two smallish tweaks to the Affordable Care Act: a tougher income verification process to make sure people are eligible for subsidies, and a one year suspension of a “reinsurance tax” that unions actually asked for, so you could arguably count that as a win for Democrats. Senate Democratic sources say they’ve conceded nothing of value, so it’s not a GOP win, while it continues to make clear that Democrats are the party of compromise and negotiation, which helps all Democrats but particularly those from red states.

So far, so good, right? I’m not sure. I worry that granting Republicans even tiny tweaks to the ACA would seem to do what the president and Democratic leaders promised they wouldn’t: reward debt-ceiling/shutdown hostage-taking, however modestly. If such a deal gets through the House in any way – and that is not a given, at all — trust Speaker John Boehner and other leaders to hype those changes as major concessions. And that’s the point of giving them anything in the first place, I presume.

But I don’t know why we’d assume that the default-denying, Confederate flag-tolerant, flat-earth caucus of the GOP would come away from this experiment in political terrorism chastened. They don’t believe the polls, which are dreadful for them. They are capable of living on bread and water and fantasy, politically. In their Fox News bubble, it’s always sunny in Tea Party land, so if they are forced to suffer this “defeat” – almost certainly with Democratic votes in the House – why would we assume they’d learn their lesson and just go away? I can imagine even Sen. Ted Cruz reassuring the rubes who are writing him checks that he’s “won” this round — and the next round will be even better.

And, sure enough, bagger cheerleader Robert Costa is certain the House will just crap on the ball and punt it back to the Senate

As of 8:30 a.m., House conservatives believe the leadership is well aware of their unhappiness, and they expect Boehner to talk up the House’s next move: another volley to the Senate, which would extend the debt ceiling, reopen the government, and set up a budget conference, plus request conservative demands that go beyond the Senate’s outline.

“What they’ll come up with in the Senate will not get the support of most House Republicans,” predicts a House conservative strategist. “And thus, after a lot of hand-wringing, it’ll be DOA. Just like with BCA in 2011, the most important question is, what can pass the House? Everything else is subordinate to that. So, while the Senate is taking the lead right now, I expect the focus will soon shift back to the House, and back to the idea of doing a six-week extension of the debt ceiling. While Obama and Reid won’t like it, they don’t want to go past October 17, either. The politics of the debt ceiling are different from the shutdown. And so, we feel they’ll reluctantly accept it as a stopgap measure.”

Dylan Scott just posted this at TPM:

Here are the details of the new House bill that the leadership presented to Republican members at a closed door meeting Tuesday morning, according to multiple House GOP sources.

• Temporary spending bill to re-open the government until Jan. 15.
• Increase the debt limit enough to last until Feb. 7.
• A two-year delay of Obamacare’s medical device tax.
• A requirement that the Obama administration verify the income of Americans receiving tax subsidies through Obamacare (specifics pending).
• A revised version of the so-called Vitter Amendment, in this case requiring Congress members and executive department officials like President Obama — but not their staffs — to purchase insurance through the law’s marketplace without federal employer subsidies.
• Eliminates Treasury Department’s ability to use “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.

The House is expected to vote on the bill today.

It’s effectively a counteroffer to the deal brewing between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the other chamber. It has a few similarities — most importantly, the dates for funding the government and raising the debt limit appear roughly the same — but some key differences.

It adds the medical device tax delay and revised Vitter amendment. It also removes a reported element of the Senate deal, which would have delayed Obamacare’s reinsurance tax, a change that Senate Democrats sought in exchange for the income verification piece.

The delay in the “reinsurance tax” mostly benefited unions, I understand

The Dem idea was to push the deadlines for the next round of hostage-taking back as close to the 2014 midterms as possible, and dare the Republicans to make ransom demands. But I don’t think the January and February dates are close enough to the midterms to matter. At this point, we might as well pass the default date, IMO. A lot of the damage already is done, anyway.

And here’s the problem: we’re already well past the point at which that certainty has been called into question. Fidelity, for instance, has no US debt coming due in October or early November, and neither does Reich & Tang:

While he doesn’t believe the U.S. will default, Tom Nelson, chief investment officer at Reich & Tang, which oversees $35 billion including $17 billion in money-market funds, said that the firm isn’t holding any U.S. securities that pay interest at the end of October through mid-November because if a default does take place, “we’d be criticized for stepping in front of that train.”

The vaseline, in other words, already has sand in it. The global faith in US institutions has already been undermined. The mechanism by which catastrophe would arise has already been set into motion. And as a result, economic growth in both the US and the rest of the world will be lower than it should be. Unemployment will be higher. Social unrest will be more destructive. These things aren’t as bad now as they would be if we actually got to a point of payment default. But even a payment default wouldn’t cause mass overnight failures: the catastrophe would be slower and nastier than that, less visible, less spectacular. We’re not talking the final scene of Fight Club, we’re talking more about another global credit crisis — where “credit” means “trust”, and “trust” means “trust in the US government as the one institution which cannot fail”.

While debt default is undoubtedly the worst of all possible worlds, then, the bonkers level of Washington dysfunction on display right now is nearly as bad. Every day that goes past is a day where trust and faith in the US government is evaporating — and once it has evaporated, it will never return. The Republicans in the House have already managed to inflict significant, lasting damage to the US and the global economy — even if they were to pass a completely clean bill tomorrow morning, which they won’t. The default has already started, and is already causing real harm. The only question is how much worse it’s going to get.

I also think this argues for the wisdom of the President citing the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling himself. If the world sees that the U.S. debt really isn’t subject to the whims of congressional extremists, maybe some of the damage can be undone

Certainly baggerism is not confined to the South, but it was born of white southern political culture, draws most of its political strength at the national level from the South, and is being more or less guided by monied southern elites. This is the theme of several commentaries out today. Let’s review.

Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the history of the 14th Amendment and how much of today’s Tea Bag Rebellion resembles the old secessionist movement.

The party of Lincoln, grand but not yet old, feared the mischief that Southern senators and representatives might get up to when their states were readmitted to the Union. The Republicans’ foremost worry was that Congress might somehow be induced to cut funds for Union pensioners or pay off lenders who had gambled on a Confederate victory. But the language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers went further. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tem of the Senate, explained that the national debt would be safer once it was “withdrawn from the power of Congress to repudiate it.” He and his colleagues didn’t say just that the debt could not be put off, or left unpaid. They said that it couldn’t even be questioned.

There are differences between the old secessionists and the new baggers. But …

Still, there are similarities. Prominent among them is a belief that a federal law need not be repealed in order to be nullified. Equally noteworthy is an apparent inability to be reconciled to the results of an election. Last November, after a campaign that turned largely on the issue of health care, Barack Obama was reëlected with a popular majority of five million. In Senate races, Democrats drew ten million more votes than Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans, whom Democrats outpolled by a million and a half, retained their legislative majority only by dint of the vagaries of districting and redistricting. The Confederates had a better case: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln got barely thirty-nine per cent of the vote, a smaller share than any Presidential winner since.

Hertzberg argues that the President has not actually ruled out resorting to the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling. He’s very reluctant to go there, yes, but he still might.

A side note — at least one bagger congressman has declared that if the debt defaults the President should be impeached, even though that same congressman will not commit to raising the debt ceiling.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) isn’t sure whether he’ll support a debt limit deal, but he is sure of one thing: a debt default would be President Barack Obama’s fault.

A reporter for The Young Turks asked Gohmert whether he’d support a bill that would raise the debt ceiling at the Values Voter Summit on Friday.

“The word ‘deal’ concerns me,” he said. “If it’s good for America.”

When asked whether he would allow the government to default on its debt, Gohmert projected the responsibility for such circumstances onto Obama.

“No,” he said, “that would be an impeachable offense by the president.”

Yep, the Republicans are the Party of Personal Responsibility. To them, whatever goes wrong, someone else is personally responsible. Going back to Hertzberg for a moment —

The House Republicans might draw up articles of impeachment, adopt them, and send them to the Senate, where the probability of a conviction would be zero. This would not be a replay of Bill Clinton and the intern. President Clinton was not remotely guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, but he was guilty of something, and that something was sordid. Yet impeachment was what put Clinton on a glide path to his present pinnacle as a wildly popular statesman. President Obama would be guilty only of saving the nation’s economy, and the world’s. It would be all he could do to head off a post-Bloombergian boomlet to somehow get around another amendment, the Twenty-second, and usher him to a third term.

On to Michael Lind, who says The South is holding America hostage. Lind says that although baggerism is largely fueled by racist rage, what’s really behind it is something else entirely —

Another mistake is the failure to recognize that the Southern elite strategy, though bound up with white supremacy throughout history, is primarily about cheap and powerless labor, not about race. If the South and the U.S. as a whole through some magical transformation became racially homogeneous tomorrow, there is no reason to believe that the Southern business and political class would suddenly embrace a new model of political economy based on high wages, high taxes and centralized government, rather than pursue its historical model of a low-wage, low-tax, decentralized system, even though all workers, employers and investors now shared a common skin color.

So the struggle is not one to convert Southern Baptists to Darwinism or to get racists to celebrate diversity. The on-going power struggle between the local elites of the former Confederacy and their allies in other regions and the rest of the United States is not primarily about personal attitudes. It is about power and wealth.

I believe he is right, and it’s good to not lose sight of that. And in a lot of ways this is a strong parallel with the secessionists of 1860-1861. In those days most southern whites were ignorant dirt farmers kept impoverished by the slave-plantation economy that made no room for them. Slavery was a financial benefit only to the small, elite plantation class, and it was the elite plantation class that demanded secession to protect slavery. Yet somehow (largely by playing on racism) the elites were able to manipulate the dirt farmers to go out and fight the damnyankees for them. See also my comments on the Million Moran March and Kim Messick, “Modern GOP IS Still the Party of Dixie.”

Lind suggests a number of measures that would strip away the South’s ability to hold back the rest of America. Progressive activists should make these a priority, IMO.

Finally, Professor Krugman suggests the way out of this mess may be a reverse-Dixiecrat coalition.

For a long time, starting as early as 1938, Democrats generally controlled Congress on paper, but actual control often rested with an alliance between Republicans and conservative Southerners who were Democrats in name only. You may not like what this alliance did — among other things, it killed universal health insurance, which we might otherwise have had 65 years ago. But at least America had a functioning government, untroubled by the kind of craziness that now afflicts us.

And right now we have all the necessary ingredients for a comparable alliance, with roles reversed. Despite denials from Republican leaders, everyone I talk to believes that it would be easy to pass both a continuing resolution, reopening the government, and an increase in the debt ceiling, averting default, if only such measures were brought to the House floor. How? The answer is, they would get support from just about all Democrats plus some Republicans, mainly relatively moderate non-Southerners. As I said, Dixiecrats in reverse.

Exactly how anyone gets around John Boehner to achieve this is not clear.

Sunday’s “Million Vets March” turned into an impromptu Klan rally at the White House gates. Reports say a few hundred people (although in the videos show a much smaller group), including non-vets Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, participated, waving a Confederate flag and hurling racist epithets to get their point across — their point being, apparently, that they are impossibly stupid and bigoted assholes.

Comment I saw on another site yesterday — The new motto of the GOP should be “We throw temper tantrums like a 2-year-old. And we vote!”

House baggers think the rally was a “game-changer” that will give their side momentum. If my Bigger Asshole Rule holds true, the House baggers may be disappointed.

Josh Marshall:

Spurred by outrage at the closure of federal war memorials they demanded be closed along with the rest of the federal government, the crowd symbolically ‘stormed’ two closed memorials and then headed to the White House where at least one Confederate Flag proudly flew and far-right gadfly Larry Klayman, who has of late been calling for an uprising to unseat the President (scheduled for Nov. 19th), told the crowd to “demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”

The protesters, some of whom appeared to be actual veterans, took barricades that had been placed around war memorials and piled them up in front of the fence around the White House. Seeing a possible threat to the perimeter, police came in to protect the fence and be sure the protesters stayed outside White House grounds. (Not unreasonable, after one of the speakers had just “figuratively” threatened the President.) An even bigger temper tantrum ensued. “Looks like something out of Kenya!” yelled one “vet.”

As Tommy Christopher pointed out at Mediate (link above), police usually are tolerant of protests outside the White House as long as nobody messes with the fence. When tourists so much as climb on the base of the fence to get a better view, they are firmly told to get down. It was obvious from the video at Mediate that the cops weren’t trying to shut down the protest; they were protecting the fence. See more videos at the NBC Washington affiliate.

Some of the vets were sincerely upset about the war memorials and the disruption of some of their services. If you are among these, here’s a clue for you:

If you are angry about the closure of the government, including the barricading of war memorials, do try to grow a brain and pile the bleeping barricades up outside the bleeping Capitol Building, not the White House. Congress is responsible for this mess, not the President. By allowing yourselves to be duped into marching against the White House, you were being used by political forces that do not give a bleep about your memorials or your benefits and would happily scrap both in exchange for bigger tax cuts for billionaires. Way to go.

Update:

Sarah Palin Decries the Use of Vets as Props While Using Vets as Props at Million Vet March http://t.co/GczLQVdwhc

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) October 14, 2013

Update: Brian Beutler:

Conservatives see Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz and imagine a national groundswell — not the two widely loathed politicians who bespeak the House GOP’s total isolation so exquisitely. They believe the latest small crowd of white conservatives protesting the closure of war monuments (which would be open had they not shut down the government) will upend the whole debate and reverse the tide of public opinion against them.

Or at least they believed it.

Moments after the story overtook nearly every significant conservative news outlet in the country, the narrative those outlets were trying to create ran headlong into the reality that the constituency for continuing to fight overlaps significantly with the constituency that bemoans the outcome of the War of Northern Aggression.

Right now we have to keep in mind that we’re dealing, in effect, with two Rights. There’s the old guard, sleazy, corrupt, in-the-pockets-of-corporatism Right, and the new batshit crazy bagger Right.

And to exemplify that the batshit crazy bagger Right is more than local yokel white geezers in Power Chairs — see this interview with Stephen Moore Michael Needham, the 31-year-old in charge of Heritage Action. He still thinks the House can defund Obamacare. I’m betting money that this kid’s wealthy family has shielded him from defeat his entire life, so it doesn’t occur to him that he might lose. And when the loss comes, you can bet he won’t learn.

Apparently the polls for Republicans are so bad that even Republican pollsters think they could be facing a disaster of biblical, wrath-of-God proportions.

GOP pollster Bill McInturff writes clients on this week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: “Overall, this is among the handful of surveys that stand out in my career as being significant and consequential, so, I wanted to make sure you had an opportunity to review the survey.”

“I would also say this about my general experience with this type of data – 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Lehman collapse, debt ceiling in 2011 – once there is this level of movement and change, it takes months for things to settle down in a way that is stable and easier to understand. This type of data creates ripples that will take a long time to resolve and there will be unexpected changes we cannot predict at the moment as a consequence.”

It’s also possible that by this time next year most folks will have moved on. But it’s not like they weren’t warned. See also the dread pirate mistermix, who points to polls suggesting some of the gerrymandered “GOP forever” congressional districts are getting wobbly.

Writing at Washington Monthly, Martin “Booman” Longman says that the Dems are holding all the cards.

Because the Republicans (in the leadership, anyway) are not actually willing to default on our debts, the end game here is that time runs out and Congress raises the debt ceiling. Whether they can get some kind of fig leaf to cover their defeat or not, they can stop making demands now because the most important thing to the president is to put an end to these kind of hostage negotiations….

… Admittedly, the Senate Republicans’ filibuster of Harry Reid’s motion to proceed to a vote on extending the debt ceiling will make some people nervous, but there is no reason to be nervous. There is virtually zero chance that the country is going to default. In fact, the Democrats have such an immense advantage right now that they are actually in a position to hold the Republicans hostage. With the clock clicking down, John Boehner will be desperate when he eventually realizes that his options are exhausted and he needs Democratic votes to avoid causing a global economic calamity.

I don’t expect any breakthroughs today. However, there are a number of news stories out saying that (1) the GOP is hemorrhaging support in the polls; and (2) the establishment GOP has had it up to here with the baggers.

My question is, does the establishment have a base any more? Or has the Tea Party eaten it?

Ron Brownstein wrote,

The reason the most confrontational congressional Republicans have seized the party’s controls is that they are most directly channeling the bottomless alienation coursing through much of the GOP’s base. That doesn’t mean Republican voters have broadly endorsed the party’s specific tactics: In this week’s United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, even GOP voters split fairly closely on the wisdom of seeking concessions on President Obama’s health care law through the debt and spending showdowns (while almost every other group preponderantly opposed that idea).

But the kamikaze caucus, by seeking to block the president by any means necessary, is reflecting the back-to-the wall desperation evident among grassroots Republicans convinced that Obama and his urbanized, racially diverse supporters are transforming America into something unrecognizable. Although those voters are split over whether the current tactics will work, they are united in resisting any accommodation with Obama.

Overlooking some of the both-sides-do-it framing, what the article says is that the GOP’s white, aging base is obsessed with the belief that “big government” amounts to their tax money paying for cushy benefits for the less deserving (i.e, not white). They honestly believe that the Democratic Party gains votes by getting minorities dependent on government handouts that white people don’t get.

Those findings suggest that the real fight under way isn’t primarily about the size of government but rather who benefits from it. The frenzied push from House Republicans to derail Obamacare, shelve immigration reform, and slash food stamps all point toward a steadily escalating confrontation between a Republican coalition revolving around older whites and a Democratic coalition anchored on the burgeoning population of younger nonwhites. Unless the former recognizes its self-interest in uplifting the latter—the future workforce that will fund entitlements for the elderly—even today’s titanic budget battle may be remembered as only an early skirmish in a generation-long siege between the brown and the gray.

The joke is, of course, that a whole lot of white people depend on those “entitlements,” too, and not just Social Security and Medicare.

However, judging by current poll numbers, the hard-core baggers are not by themselves a big enough group to keep Republicans in Washington. With congressional district gerrymandering and deep pocket donors the GOP isn’t going to disappear. They’ll likely keep control of the House for a while. But unless the party can make a significant course change to broaden its base, the 2010 midterms may have been their last hurrah for, well, a long time to come.

Maybe forever? The actual death of a major party is not something that happens often, and I’ll believe it when I see it. But for the end-is-nigh arguments, see John Judis and Elias Isquith.

Yesterday some Republicans saw the handwriting on the wall, or at least in the polls, and realized that the shutdown/debt ceiling grandstanding is hurting them a lot more than it is hurting the Dems. So many are backing off the “kill Obamacare” fight.

So what now? Brian Beutler thinks they’re about to make things even worse for themselves

Republican leaders want to phase out the fight by changing the terms and terrain. And their new targets are — wait for it — Medicare and Social Security. See this Op-Ed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in which he mentions Obamacare precisely zero times, and argues instead that Congress’ central focus should be cutting much more popular, durable programs. He even names a couple of specific Medicare adjustments Democrats might support, but only in a plan that includes new tax revenues. Guess how many times the word “revenues” appears in the piece.

This is not the battle you want to pick if your electoral imperatives require you to pander to white voters. Maybe in the days ahead, once the government is reopened and the risk of immediate default has passed, Republicans will walk away from the past month’s events and pretend they never happened. The Obamacare defunders chastened. The establishment just grateful to have the latest embarrassment behind them.

Janet Yellen has been named Chair of the Federal Reserve. But as for the Great Stupid Impasse in Washington, I can’t say that anything significant has happened over the past 24 hours or so.

I’m glad somebody finally said this — the 14th Amendment applies to Congress. Many have said that the 14th gives the President a means to raise the debt ceiling without Congress, and maybe it does. But more significantly, the public debt clause in the 14th binds Congress to not allow the nation to default. You’d think the baggers who get misty-eyed in reverence for the great founding document, would notice this. More proof they can’t read?

See also the Booman

Harry Reid plans to put a long-term debt increase with no strings attached up for a vote in the Senate this week. He needs just six Republicans to join the Dems for a two-thirds vote, and Reid seems to think he can get that. If not, he will challenge Senate Republicans to kill it with a filibuster, making them own the default. If the bill does pass, it will pressure the House, somehow. Although I’m not sure how. The House appears to be too oblivious to be pressured.

Brian Beutler adds another twist:

Reid will likely use a mechanism to allow the president to increase the debt limit on his own, subject to a veto-able resolution of disapproval by the Congress. In other words, the only way the debt limit won’t increase is if two-thirds of both the House and Senate feel it must be pulled back into the realm of legislative horsetrading — something that will never happen absent bipartisan agreement.

I’ve been bouncing around checking out several news stories about this, and most are hazy on details. I’m not sure if the people writing the news stories quite understand what’s going on, either.

A mess o’ Republicans and their supporters have persuaded themselves that the dire predictions of disaster if the debt ceiling isn’t raised are just scare stories coming from the White House. Power Tool John Hinderaker explains that the United States cannot default on debt, because the 14th Amendment says it can’t, therefore God will send us the magic beans we need to find all kinds of surplus money sluicing around Washington.

All we have to do is prioritize, see. Just cut other stuff, like Medicare and the Marines, and we’ll be fine. Just don’t close war memorials.

In short, House Republicans will not see sense, and most Senate Republicans won’t, either, although maybe enough will to get a two-thirds vote.