Obama to Boehner: I Am A Dictator, & Dictators Don't Negotiate

by JASmius

B-b-but, Newt Gingrich said he wasn't a dictator and had an "obligation to negotiate"!  (No joke, he really said that the other day in of those "Gingrich Productions" emails, on whose email list I somehow ended up, but don't quite care enough one way or the other to go to the bother of getting my name removed from).

Quite obviously, Dear Leader disagrees - and is upping the ante:

President Barack Obama called House Speaker John Boehner late Friday and reiterated that he would not negotiate with Congress on raising the debt limit, a Boehner representative told Newsmax.... 

"The president telephoned Speaker Boehner and told him again that the full faith and credit of the United States should not and will not be subject to negotiation," an administration official told Politico in a statement. "The president reiterated that it is the constitutional responsibility of the U.S. Congress to pass the nation's budget and pay the nation’s bills."

Ah, yes, the "borrowing forever is fiscally responsible" school of "thought".  Because, naturally, the late Margaret Thatcher was just joshing about "running out of other people's money".

O must have gotten wind of the Speaker's Plan B and his trying to head him off at the pass:

The plan that Majority Leader Eric Cantor proceeded to unveil will give the GOP its chance at a fight. The first round, a short-term continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government that will come to the House floor on Friday, will also defund Obamacare and include language to prioritize how incoming tax revenue will be spent in the event the debt ceiling is not raised. 

That will give Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and others a chance to wage the fight over Obamacare in the upper chamber.

IOW, it'll shut them up and make them pull their own weight for a change instead of sitting back, safe in the minority, and throwing spitballs at their House counterparts who actually have to run their chamber.  And did I mention they can't filibuster Dirty Harry Reid's inevitable stripping of the OCare defunding language?  Lotsa luck, guys!

But given that Majority Leader Harry Reid rules the Senate, it is unlikely to bear fruit in the way of significant concessions on Obamacare. Instead, the push to defund Obamacare will be transferred to negotiations surrounding the debt ceiling, which must be raised around the middle of October.

“We go right to the debt-ceiling fight, and that’s where the real battle is, we feel,” said Representative John Fleming. “It’s kind of like the follow-up plan, assuming that [the CR] fails. . . . The real fight will be on the debt ceiling.”

House budget chairman Paul Ryan also urged colleagues to wage the more serious fight over the debt ceiling. “We have to stay on the right side of public opinion,” he told his colleagues. “Shutting down the government puts us on the wrong side. The fight is on the debt limit.”

In exchange for a debt-ceiling increase, Cantor told colleagues, the GOP will issue a litany of demands, including a one-year delay of Obamacare, construction of the Keystone pipeline, an anti-regulatory bill called the REINS Act, and other spending reforms. The exact combination will be negotiated with President Obama and Reid.

This is, needless to say, a much smarter approach than the series of Pickett's Charges for which Tea Partiers are so gung ho.  Rather than getting focused to the point of obsession on the metaphorical Cemetery Hill of forcing the Dems to swallow a continuing resolution that defunds discretionary OCare funding, which Republicans don't have the leverage to pull off, this puts the battle on more favorable public relations ground.  The public is more against a government shutdown than they are ObamaCare - particularly independents- but they're more against another "clean" debt ceiling hike than both of them.

Additionally, recall that the last debt ceiling showdown two years ago resulted in one of Barack Obama's biggest unforced errors, the Sequester; O meant it as a bluff, but Boehner was happy to call and pocket it, and the result has been the first consecutive year decrease in overall federal spending (discretionary plus entitlements) since the end of the Korean War.  I'll say it again: if you want to lay Barack Obama low, don't take on him, his pigmentation, and his massive propaganda army frontally; simply get out of the way and let his ideological extremism collapse under its own weight.  Think THAT won't happen starting in nine days?

The demand laundry list in exchange for a debt ceiling hike reinforces that.  Delaying OCare entirely for a year is a no-brainer, as The One can hardly argue against it when he himself has deferred the employer mandate and issued those blizzards of waivers to his fellow-travelers and well-connected cronies and hangers-on (aaaaaand Congress).  The Keystone pipeline is also a no-brainer, publicly popular, and a cinch boon to genuine job creation, as North Dakota - aka "The New Texas" - is conspicuously demonstrating.  It forces Red Barry to pick his poison, all of which put him on the defensive and minimize Republican vulnerabilities.

The fact that he's cutting right to that chase seems to me a dead giveaway that he knows all of the above and is attempting, belatedly and rather pathetically, to bully the House GOP away from that tack.  Maybe that's why even House TPers are jazzed about it.

To quote Chancellor Gowron: "And now the war.....can continue."