Looks like Tea Partiers are succeeding in holding the Boehner bill hostage before Dirty Harry Reid can kill it:
A Republican plan to cut the budget deficit stumbled toward a vote in Congress on Thursday and its expected demise could force a compromise to avert an imminent and unprecedented debt default by the world's largest economy.
With the measure short of as many as four votes, according to aides, the Republican-led House of Representatives abruptly delayed a vote as Speaker John Boehner struggled to overcome objections from conservative rebels in his own party.
Republican Representative Mick Mulvaney, a supporter of the Tea Party movement that demands even deeper spending cuts, said he still would vote against the bill as he left Boehner's office to pray at the congressional chapel.
"I'm still a no," he said.
You know who else is a no? The right-wing Mary Tyler Moore. And you'll never believe her avowed core pretext: Because the Boehner bill doesn't repeal ObamaCare. Never mind that this House's first order of business six months ago was...a bill repealing ObamaCare, which was dutifully passed, and died a quick, inevitable death at Harry Reid's hands. Which is the same fate that the Speaker's compromise bill is going to meet with or without the pie in the sky fantasies that TPers like Bachmann are demanding. As much as I sympathize with the goal, I am baffled, and reaching the point of being contemptuously so, as to what would be accomplished by such a stance, besides feeding the very propaganda meme of Tea Partiers being "unreasonable" and "extremist" that Dems have been spinning for the past two years.
I find myself in hearty agreement with Aaron Goldstein's conclusion:
[I]f Michele Bachmann should be elected President then she is free to dismantle Obamacare as her first act in office. But for her to oppose Boehner's bill because it doesn't repeal funding for Obamacare when Republicans aren't in a position to see such a provision through in the first place is just plain daft and doesn't inspire my confidence.
It's worse than that, actually: I think her nomination would guarantee another Johnson-Goldwater disaster that would set back the conservative movement for as least as long - which, in the present national predicament, would be more than sufficient to finish off America as a constitutional republic for good.
Bachmann didn't say, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," but she may as well have.
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