I've noticed that this President, when he's up to something particularly tricky, telegraphs his punch by casually saying he doesn't want to drop the other shoe.
Here he is hinting that he has another shoe, but doesn't want to drop it:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/25/obama-working-without-congress-tempting/But he is going to drop it. Soon, he's going to inform Congress that if he doesn't get the debt ceiling raised, he's going to invoke the provisions of
NSPD-51, or a similar anti-terror provision from somewhere else, and begin using the authority the previous President claimed he had to "coordinate" the efforts of Congress, because it's Congress that created the emergency.
When confronted with a plan, a list of authorities largely populated by Republican-passed laws from the 00s, and an outlined plan of action that allows the President to do
whatever the hell he wants, enforced by the nations' armed forces, Members of Congress are going to shit their pants. Most of them have no idea they already turned over this much authority to the White House.
What I don't know is what, exactly, the President wants. The obvious answer is he wants the debt ceiling raised. But he also likes to make the Republicans pay for any prolonged negotiation by using their greed against them and forcing them to sacrifice future electoral viability. That's why his own plans closed tax loopholes for the rich, because the Republicans will give away almost everything else to prevent that from happening. He's also more than happy to offer future concessions that can be easily reversed at a later time--like the health care compromise, for example.
So here's what a successful outcome will have: a two-year raising of the debt ceiling, so that the GOP cannot return to it before the election; some sort of "compromise" that will outrage the people here at DU but which will not go into effect until 2013, when the presumed overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress can walk it back, creating an impetus for Democrats to vote; and something else, a "penalty extraction" if you will, that the President will take away from the Republicans just because they're being assholes.
Last week the press mentioned that one of the big goings-on behind closed doors was Republican attempts to reverse the ass-whipping they got from the
last "compromise" they reached, over tax cuts. That issue alone is going to kill them in the next election if they don't get the tax cuts further extended. That's the one thing the President won't relax. But he will definitely give them some hollow thing to beat on so that they too can claim they came away with something. Even that thing may be designed to blow up in their faces at the appropriate time.
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