"Conservatives balked at $18 billion in Pell Grants for low-income students"

[Roland99]

The weak speaker: How a failed debt vote disarmed the nation's top Republican
http://news.yahoo.com/weak-speaker-failed-debt-vote-disarmed-nations-top-111905041.html

House Speaker John Boehner failed to muster enough GOP votes to pass his plan to raise the debt limit on Thursday night, throwing into question the fate of Boehner's proposal as well as that of his speakership. Republican leaders must now rewrite the legislation in order to attract more conservatives as they try to pass a revised version on Friday. But considerable damage has been done. Boehner's negotiating stance in the ongoing effort to trim deficits and raise the debt ceiling by next Tuesday's deadline is hobbled; any credibility he had in claiming that his restive members could get behind a consensus debt deal has vanished. The Speaker has gone lame.

The House was expected to vote Thursday evening on Boehner's legislation, which would raise the debt ceiling through the end of 2011 in exchange for $917 billion in spending cuts and the creation of a special committee to find more savings that would accompany a second debt-ceiling vote in January. It looked as if Boehner would have the votes early Thursday, but by 5 p.m., Republican leaders announced that the vote would be postponed. As hours slipped by, dozens of reporters congregated outside the Speaker's offices on the second floor of the Capitol. The sun set. Pizzas and sodas were brought in

...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had already declared the House Republican plan dead on arrival in the Senate. But House leaders worked to push the measure through because, as they told their members, it would give them greater leverage in negotiations with the Senate and, perhaps more importantly, their own credibility as dealmakers was on the line. Boehner hoped to force the Senate - and President Obama - to take his version of the debt bill. The Speaker was crafting legislation with Reid until last weekend, but the two split over whether to raise the debt ceiling through 2012 in one vote, as Democrats wanted, or to try for a second debt limit hike in six months. Reid and Obama argued that holding another tortured debt ceiling debate in January, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, would be politically unwise and economically dangerous.

But after he split with Reid, Boehner was left with a bill that was too far to the left for the ideological purists in his conference. Conservatives balked at $18 billion in Pell Grants for low-income students that Boehner had included to lure Democratic votes. They were also disappointed that the bill only called for $917 billion in cuts. Their preferred legislation - a conservative dream bill known as Cut, Cap and Balance that passed the House earlier in July on a near party-line vote - would've halved the projected $7.1 trillion federal 10-year deficit by next year. That bill died in the Senate.

For a mere $18 billion to help educate the nation's poor who otherwise probably won't have a shot at a higher education, the Terrorist Party members are holding this nation's economic well-being as a hostage.

Fucking asshats. One and all.

[liberal N proud]

1. They don't want to end poverty

They want to make sure people stay poor all their life. Insuring that no one can pull up their bootstraps and get an education.

[GoCubsGo]

2. If people were ecucated....

...these assholes would never get elected to the road kill clean-up crew, let alone Congress or the Senate, or any other high-level public office.

[PA Democrat]

3. At the same time states are cutting funding to state universities

putting an education even further out of reach for anyone but the wealthy.