The above video shows the altercations leading up to the unprovoked macing of two women by an NYPD detective inspector, identified by online activists as Anthony Bologna, a finding confirmed by the NYPD itself. The incident has raised serious questions about what the planned response to the protests was, and whether there were orders in place for officers to intervene to halt the peaceful demonstrations. In the video, there are numerous incidents where individual officers, apparently acting in a disorganized and spontaneous fashion, physically strike, tackle, drag or pepper-spray unarmed civilians on a public street.

It is clear that police officers do heroic work in service of the public order, and that their active role in promoting the rule of law and keeping the peace is vital to the functioning of an open, democratic, civil society. But it is also clear that citizens cannot permit the justice system to be corrupted by undisciplined, unruly or even violent individuals who betray their uniform and their oath to serve and to protect the public. The NYPD is facing a decision, about whether to side with an absolute ban on unprovoked assaults of unarmed civilian bystanders legally entitled to both assemble and to use public streets for personal business or to condone the unjustified, unlawful physical assault of such persons by officers operating beyond their legal authority.

The choice is that stark, and the City of New York should make clear that there is no moral dilemma to consider: any unprovoked assault by an officer of the law against any unarmed civilian—including where the officer believed he was being forced to listen to uncomfortable words and slogans—must be treated as a violent, unprovoked assault, not as the lawful conduct of police business. All accused should be accorded appropriate due process, but unlawful physical violence against civilians cannot go unpunished if the rule of law and the integrity of the authorities of the City of New York are to be credible.

It is ultimately citizens, not agents of the government, who govern in the American system of democracy. It is citizens who have the higher standing before the law. Citizens are subject to reasonable prohibitions enacted in law, but so are law-enforcement officers. It is the law-enforcement officers whose freedom to act without deference to others is constrained by the Constitutional principle that only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution can accrue to the government.

No such provision exists for treating unarmed civilians as hostile combatants simply for walking on a public street, gathering to chant slogans, or discussing matters of controversy. In fact, numerous amendments to the Constitution specifically prohibit such actions by police.

The First Amendment guarantees the right to free assembly, to free expression and to petition the government for redress of grievances. For police to claim they were forced into violent acts because people expressed their views, gathered in public or voiced complaints about police activity, is as absurd as it is irrational. It is not a legal defense.

The Fourth Amendment protects the rights of all individuals against “unreasonable search and seizure”. Altercations in which police lay hands on unarmed civilians without legal just cause are incidents occurring outside the law, and which directly violate the Constitutional protection of civil liberties. Such incidents are an affront to due process and an abdication of any special authority under the law.

Any incident in which physical force is used to coerce behavior, coerce movement, retaliate for words spoken, or otherwise improperly seize control of the person or the property of any civilian, is an aggression against the citizens of the United States generally and against those individuals personally, and should be treated as a criminal act. We write with a spirit of genuine sympathy for the hard-working people of the NYPD, and for their normally world-leading professional service to the public. But we believe that as citizens, we all have a right to demand that no arm of our government ever be forced to undergo the shame and corruption of direct association with such unlawful behavior or such fundamentally undemocratic pretensions to unassigned powers.

The City of New York has an opportunity, provided by the nonviolent protest movement seeking to use purely peaceful, entirely lawful, strictly democratic means of protest, to show to the world what a genuinely stable, upstanding, and secure civil society does when there is widespread public dissatisfaction. The City of New York has an opportunity to show it stands with the people who comprise its body politic, the people who in fact govern and whose consent gives legitimacy to those who serve in government office.

The choice is clear: reprimand, suspend, investigate and punish—according to the evidence and the law—all acts of physical violence against unarmed civilians. Do this, and show deference to the rule of law, the virtues of a vibrant civil society, and the need for an active, informed citizenry. The soul of the City of New York is now on trial.

Today, the 20th of September, 2011, the discriminatory US military policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, which required thousands of gay personnel to serve their country while keeping their private life secret. Honorable people were discharged only because someone else found out they were not heterosexual. In some cases, the ideal military officer for a highly skilled, difficult-to-fill position were discharged despite being the most qualified person for operationally vital positions.

“The strength of America is her ability to undo her faults,” said Alexis de Tocqueville. For nearly two decades, the United States military has lived with a law that hampered its readiness, undermined the shared trust of its service members, and threatened to ruin the professional lives of some of its most committed and selfless patriots. From today, those committed professionals and selfless citizen volunteers, will be able to serve honorably, and openly, improving the readiness and excellence of our military.

The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, ends a tragic example of prejudice ordained by federal law, and helps to restore the dignity and integrity of a nation of law, founded to uphold the equal, natural, universal rights, of all people.

Wisconsin is holding six recall elections tonight in response to popular petition to unseat Republican state senators who supported Gov. Walker’s plan to strip public servants of their collective bargaining rights. Each of the six Republican incumbents occupy senate seats representing districts drawn by Republicans to ensure Republican victories, so any victory represents a significant shift in party preference.

The Democrats need to win three seats in order to take control of the state Senate, and deal a serious blow to Gov. Walker and his allies in the state legislature.

As of 10:02 local time, the Republicans had saved three seats:

• In District 2, Sen. Robert Cowles defeated Nancy Nusbaum—59%-41% (94% reporting).
• In District 10, Sen. Sheila Harsdorf fought off the challenger Shelly Moore—58%-42%.
• In District 14, Sen. Luther Olson defeated Fred Clark—52%-48%.

In the other three races, the story was more favorable to the Democratic challengers:

• In the 32nd district, challenger Jennifer Shilling was leading incumbent Dan Kapanke by 8 percentage points.
• Incumbent Randy Hopper was leading Jessica King by 2, separated by just 500 votes, with King’s base of support in Osh Kosh yet to report.
• But most significantly, Walker ally Alberta Darling—for whom Republican supporters and outside groups spent at least $8 million—was trailing Sandy Pasch by 8%, though there were still some very favorable areas for Darling yet to report.

Just a few minutes later, with 87% reporting, Jessica King had pulled ahead of Randy Hopper by 137 votes.

At 10:08 pm, Democrat Jennifer Shilling became the first challenger to unseat one of the recalled Republicans. John Nichols noted that Dan Kapanke was elected during the Obama landslide election year, and has been removed for office after voting to strip public servants of their organizing rights.

The race between Pasch and Darling shifted quickly, as Pasch first widened her lead, then ceded ground, leaving the race too close to call:

• By 10:11 pm, Sandy Pasch was holding her lead over Alberta Darling by a margin of 55% to 45%, and King and Hopper remained too close to call.
• By 10:18 pm local time, with 57% of the votes counted, Pasch was leading Darling by a margin of 58% to 42%.
• But just two minutes later, with the latest reports showing 63% reporting, Darling had closed the gap to 51% to 49%.

At 10:20 pm, Jessica King was leading incumbent Randy Hopper by less than 200 votes, with 87% of the votes counted. There are concerns that irregularities that occurred during state Supreme Court elections earlier this year might be repeated in some pro-Republican areas. Observers have suggested a Pasch win would be a major defeat for the Republicans, while local Democratic organizers remained confident King would pull ahead of Hopper when the number from Osh Kosh came in.

At 10:30 pm local time, Pasch was holding her lead over Darling, 51% to 49%, leading by a margin of fewer than 1,000 votes.

At 10:38 pm, with 97% of precincts reporting, Jessica King was leading Randy Hopper by 27,123 votes to 25,951—51% to 49%. In District 8, with 67% of precincts reporting, Pasch was leading Darling 52% to 48%, by a reported margin of roughly 1,200 votes.

At 10:39 pm Wisconsin time, in District 18, Jessica King was named the projected winner, becoming the second Democrat to unseat a Republican state senator for supporting Gov. Walker’s anti-union agenda.

- – - 

Suspicion of irregularities: Shortly before 11:00 pm local time, with 68% reporting from District 8, Sandy Pasch was still leading Alberta Darling by a margin of 51% to 49%, but the vote counting reportedly stopped.

Think Progress is reporting that Waukesha County would be providing no further results for at least an hour. The announcement is reminiscent of what has occurred in multiple past elections, where similar stalls in the release of vote counts immediately preceded the “discovery” of new votes that swung a tight election toward the Republican candidate.

The county clerk, Kathy Nickolaus has become known for her involvement in these alleged irregularities, and tonight there has been fast and furious criticism of her handling of elections, her party’s tolerance of what is seen as a deeply flawed track record, and of what appear to be new irregularities.

At this hour, there are mounting concerns that a county official with a history of being involved in irregularities that shift the vote toward the Republican party might interfere with the integrity of the election. One Wisconsin member of the House of Representatives called on the United States Dept. of Justice to investigate the irregularities that took place earlier this year.

With the history of manipulations, allegations of criminal election fraud, and the balance of power in the Wisconsin state Senate at risk, it is suspected that irregularities may be in the works. Democratic State Sen. Jon Erpenbach said it was “ridiculous” that the local county officials stalled the count, because they are using the exact same machines used throughout the state.

At 11:12 pm local time, the news broke that with 79% of local precincts reporting, the incumbent Alberta Darling had taken the lead, by a margin of 52% to 48% over challenger Sandy Pasch. At 11:19, with 80% reporting, Darling widened her lead to 53% to 47%.

Sen. Erpenbach expressed concern about the integrity of the election process in Waukesha County. Mike Tate, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic party, issued a statement shortly after the sudden swing to Darling, suggesting there is now evidence of election tampering and a serious need for a closer look at what has taken place at the county clerk’s office in Waukesha County.

- – -

At 11:31 pm local time, with 82% of precincts reporting, Darling was leading 53% to 47%. After the back and forth swings throughout the evening, the consistent 53% to 47% reporting sparked still more suspicion of irregularities.

— Wednesday, August 10, 2011 —

At 12:36 am, local time, the AP called the election for Alberta Darling, with observers split over whether the recall election had been conducted legally. In Waukesha County, the county clerk has been accused of manipulating the release of ballots, and there are mounting calls for a federal criminal probe.

At 7:41 am, local time, with 100% of all precincts reporting in District 10, the vote count was 39,471 to 34,096, giving Darling a 54% to 46% victory over Pasch. Some Democratic party members have softened their criticism of Waukesha County clerk Kathy Nickolaus, while others are alleging election fraud.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is being sued for allegedly formulating policies that led to the torture of multiple American citizens, at the hands of American military personnel in Iraq. Now, for the second time this month, in two distinct cases, a federal court has found that Mr. Rumsfeld does not enjoy any immunity for actions occurring either during his service as Secretary of Defense or in a war zone.

The government had argued that Mr. Rumsfeld enjoyed a special immunity from liability for any actions taken during his tenure as Secretary of Defense or for any activities that occurred in a war zone. The two criteria, according to the court, would result in the essential stripping of any right of citizens to seek redress for grievances against public officials or against unlawful military action in a “warzone”, loosely defined—there was never a formal declaration of war against Iraq.

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

“We agree with the district court that a … remedy is available for the alleged torture of civilian US citizens by US military personnel in a war zone,” Judge David Hamilton wrote for the two-judge majority.

He said the government’s argument, if accepted, would “deprive civilian US citizens of a civil judicial remedy for torture or even cold-blooded murder by federal officials and soldiers, at any level, in a war zone.”

“United States law provides a civil damages remedy for aliens who are tortured by their own governments,” Judge Hamilton wrote. “It would be startling and unprecedented to conclude that the United States would not provide such a remedy to its own citizens.”

The court’s finding is consistent with other cases, where serious crimes have been alleged and government officials were found to have been involved in ordering, overseeing or condoning the unlawful activity. In Mr. Rumsfeld’s case, it is public knowledge that he helped Pres. George W. Bush institute a program of “harsh interrogation” techniques and military detention without charge.

The lawsuit is likely to open up, in some cases for the first time, details of how the use of the term “enemy combatant” came to be applied in what some constitutional scholars say was an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial detentions. It is also likely to bring into court some startling revelations that emerged when WikiLeaks released documents detailing official awareness of extreme, and even fatal, methods of torture being used by Iraqi forces.

According to official US government documents, US soldiers reported the torture being conducted by Iraqi military personnel on at least 100 separate occasions to their superiors, but were uniformly ordered, by command “at the highest levels”—reports the Christian Science Monitor—not to intervene.

According to the court filings, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel were in Iraq working for a private military contractor, when they became suspicious the company was engaged in corruption. The firm’s reaction, allegedly, was to strip them of authorization to enter the so-called Green Zone—relegating them to urban areas subject to persistent open combat.

Vance and Ertel then took their case to the US Embassy, to ask for assistance. The two men allege that instead of being rewarded for blowing the whistle, they were detained and held incommunicado by the US military. They say they were subjected to phyical and psychological abuse throughout their entire term of detention, and that Mr. Rumsfeld was the government official who orchestrated the type of detention and abuse to which they were subjected, with no foundation in law.

The appeals court ruling brings the case one step closer to a full hearing, and raises the possibility that Rumsfeld could be found personally liable for criminal abuse, illegal detention and civil rights violations, in civil court. Such an outcome would almost certainly raise the prospects for domestic criminal charges against the former Defense secretary, and possibly other officials of the former administration.

In order to win support from radical Tea Party freshmen, most of whom voted against the legislation anyway, Congressional leaders imposed stiff new tax penalties on radiate students across the country. Specifically, subsidized loans for grad students were cut—the government provides all student loans, so this effectively eliminates funding for post-graduate education—and a tax credit for borrowers who repay student loans on time for 12 consecutive months was eliminated.

The tax credit eliminated costs far less than the massive subsidies going to oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power companies, yet the Tea Party freshmen, who have touted their opposition to any and every tax increase, did nothing to oppose the tax hikes on students. And while the tax credits may be much smaller than fossil fuel subsidies, or nuclear, eliminating them will cost far more.

Eliminating the on-time repayment credit will reduce the likelihood of on-time repayment significantly, potentially costing the government billions, over time, as well as subjecting more borrowers to fines and fees, depleting their personal economic footprint, and serving as a drag on growth.

The logic is simply astonishing: while the radical anti-tax Tea Partiers, backed by billionaire partisans, claim as an article of faith the absolute truth that any and all tax cuts incentivize the wealthy to create jobs—though we have ten years of evidence this is often not the case—, they reject the idea that a direct cash incentive for repayment will pay off—despite the evidence that it does.

In fact, the particular kind of tax increase the Tea Partiers have demanded and are supporting is more costly and will exacerbate not only budget shortfalls but also the negative economic trends whereby the American people are unnecessarily disadvantaged in the face of far more powerful economic forces.

Allegations that the so-called Tea Party caucus has degenerated into little more than a lobby for the wealthy interests that back them gain credibility when they support tax hikes on the vulnerable, and which will have a direct negative impact on the middle class. It should be well understood by all: the House Tea Party Republicans have pushed for and supported—the anti-student provisions in the failed Republican-only House bills were far worse—tax hikes that will make college more expensive and eat way at middle class wealth.

Two public opinion surveys released today are raising eyebrows among political analysts, as they show the sharp disapproval the American people feel toward the hardline elements in Congress that nearly drove the nation into default. A CNN/ORC poll found that 77% of those polled believe members of Congress involved in the debt negotiations behaved like “spoiled children”.

CNN also found:

The overall approval rating for Congress, now at 14 percent, is at an all-time low. Sixty-eight percent of respondents disapprove of how the Republican leaders in Congress handled the debt ceiling, 63 percent disapprove of Democratic leadership and 53 percent disapprove of President Obama’s role in the agreement.

A poll from the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center found a uniformly negative response from the public to how Congress managed the negotiation process. Among the most prominent words chosen were: “ridiculous”, “disgusting”, “stupid”, “childish”, “terrible”, “frustrating”, “scary”, “outrageous”, “chaos”, “disgrace” and “pathetic”.

Specifically, out of 1,001 respondents, the following numbers of people put the following descriptions at the top of the list:

1. Ridiculous — 66
2. Disgust/disgusting/disgusted — 42
3. Stupid/stupidity — 36
4. Frustrating/frustrated — 26
5. Poor/poorly — 25
6. Terrible — 25
7. Disappointing/disappointment/disappointed — 24
8. Childish — 23
9. Joke — 22
10. Mess/messy — 22

Rep. Charlie Rangel suggested today to MSNBC’s Martin Bashir that the Tea Party freshmen, many of them anti-tax radicals who vowed to drive the nation to default, come what may, have behaved like a “suicide cult”—Rangel provided the word “cult”, while Bashir inferred “suicide cult” from his analysis.

It is unclear how the ongoing debt and deficit reduction negotiations will play out, but it is certain that much of this public disgust and ire will be felt by members of Congress visiting their home districts throughout the August recess. This week may involve negotiations between the executive branch and ratings agencies and major banks, to ensure the US does not see its credit rating downgraded, while the new program of cuts is negotiated.

Pres. Barack Obama today addressed the nation from the White House Rose Garden, explaining how the grand compromise on debt and deficits will play out, as negotiations on new debt reduction continue. He spoke after the United States Senate passed the controversial debt deal, with the second significantly bipartisan vote in two days.

Obama said “the American people may have voted for divided government; they did not vote for dysfunctional government”. He called for cooperative bipartisan solutions, going forward, and noted that while “deficit reduction is part of the agenda, it is not the whole agenda.” He promised serious and sustained effort to incentivize job creation, balance revenues against spending cuts, and protect needed public services, like enforcement of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

He called for investment from the private sector in construction and infrastructure development, and suggested a national infrastructure bank would allow private capital to begin to flow to those projects. Obama suggested that “Both parties share power in Washington, and both parties need to take responsibility for improving this economy,” and called for sustained and cooperative focus, whether or not there is the threat of national default.

The Senate voted 74 to 26 to pass the debt package. Both Democrats and Republicans opposed the measure and a broad coalition from both parties supported passage. This marks the second consecutive day that a broad bipartisan coalition voted to pass legislation that few liked, but all agreed was necessary to stave off potentially calamitous economic fallout.

The composition of the national debt is a complex history of policy decisions, governmental priorities and Congressional authorizations. Republican opponents of Pres. Obama have suggested that debt and deficits have “exploded” since he took office. They have sought to paint the president as a “tax and spend liberal”, because that accusation fits their standard campaign model.

But economists and budget analysts, including a top budget aide to Republican presidents Reagan and Bush, the elder, say Obama’s actual performance as president puts his budget policy in the “moderate conservative” segment of the fiscal policy spectrum. He has routinely demanded from Congress that major legislation be “paid for” or “deficit neutral”, and he has struggled mightily—putting aside his own policy priorities—to slow the expansion of deficits that stems from policies enacted by the previous administration.

Among these major policy drivers are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration simply never included either war in official budget projections, requiring Congress to fund both through “supplemental” spending agreements. The result was that two massive unfunded wars, each adding trillions to government spending, over a decade, were kept “off the books”.

Barack Obama—who voted to oppose raising the debt ceiling when he was a senator, in part because he believed the “off the books” accounting was going to bankrupt the government and pose a threat to the nation’s long term health and prosperity—viewed this as unethical and pledged to put the wars on the books, so the public, and the Congress, could more directly judge the costs and benefits of the wars and plan for the long term.

What is vitally important for all independent voters to understand is that while the debt debate has been laced-through with intense partisan rhetoric and vitriolic attacks, is that there are real drivers of the national debt, and they have little to do with socialism. The national debt is a product of patterns of borrowing that have soared over the last three decades, largely from one particular problem: the coincidence of relentless tax cutting with the need to fund existing programs and address real-world challenges.

In 1981, when Pres. Jimmy Carter left office, the national debt was under $1 trillion. By the time Pres. Ronald Reagan left office, in 1989, the national debt was close to $3 trillion. During Pres. George H.W. Bush’s first year in office, when the budget was Reagan’s last budget, the national debt broke $3 trillion.

The first Pres. Bush was a better debt manager than his immediate predecessor or his son; debt grew by roughly $1.4 trillion, during his 4 years in office. Pres. Clinton did a little better, adding about the same amount over 8 years. But Clinton achieved an important result: he left the government with projected budget surpluses exceeding the total national debt, over the coming decade.

Pres. George W. Bush took office in 2001 with those surpluses in place. His 2001 tax cut, however, reversed the entire surplus, and by the time of his reelection in 2004, he added to the (once again) growing debt another $1.7 trillion. By the time he left office in 2009, the national debt had escalated to over $10 trillion, and the debt ceiling was already primed for another $2 trillion in borrowing.

That extra $2 trillion in borrowing was necessary, to pay for spending already “in the pipeline”, already passed into law and on the federal books, either as part of the official budget or supplemental spending. By the end of 2009, with George W. Bush’s last annual budget playing out, the national debt was at $12 trillion. It would be mid 2010, before the active federal budget was “owned” by Obama.

As of this writing, the policies of George W. Bush have added fully $7 trillion to the national debt. Since then, Pres. Obama’s policies have added another $1.4 trillion, and already planned spending policy, historically low government tax revenues and the economic reality of tight credit, slow growth and lagging job creation, makes it very difficult for him for him to cut spending to a level where he would be able to match Pres. Bush, the elder and Pres. Clinton, in managing the national debt.

His record on budgets has been one of reformer: he has consistently favored institutional reforms that impose real cuts, and bend cost growth down to match or fall below inflation. But reducing spending can reduce national economic growth as well, further straining the national debt trend lines.

What Pres. George H.W. Bush and Pres. Clinton were able to manage was a cooperative Congressional environment, in which tough bargains were made with rivals in Congress. Pres. Obama has not had that luxury, and it may be he will not have it. There are growing tensions in the Republican party, resulting from real disagreement about whether budget and debt should be used for partisan strategy or whether they should be non-partisan policy items, with all voting in favor of the national interest.

Independent voters are looking for sanity. We are looking for reason and clarity. We are looking for long-term policy decisions that help steer the nation toward prosperity and sustainable, generalized economic wellbeing. We need a balanced standard for budget policy, where revenues increase to meet costs, so the United States remains the world’s leading fiscal policy driver and the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency.

There is opportunity in the budget policy negotiations, but the opportunity will be missed, if one or both sides refuse to use the negotiations to reach a constructive, well-designed, well-funded, rational policy on national community reinvestment, infrastructure upgrades, education and new revenues capable of meeting our needs and our aims.

Tonight, Pres. Barack Obama announced to the nation and the world that he and the leaders of both parties, in both houses of Congress, have reached agreement on a plan to raise the nation’s debt ceiling through the 2012 election and into 2013. The deal immediately cuts $1 trillion, then relies on “triggers” to guarantee future spending cuts.

A bipartisan bicameral debt reduction committee will have to present a program of new, agreed cuts, by the end of this year, or the new law will make tough cuts that neither party favors automatic. The triggers allow all parties to sign on to a deal that will raise the debt ceiling until after the 2012 elections—importantly preventing an even more partisan, more contentious negotiation in 2012—without increasing overall borrowing.

The House and Senate are now laboring to rush the bill through, to win bipartisan support for passage, and to do so before tomorrow’s deadline for national default. There is tough opposition by members of both parties, and by radicals and moderates in both parties. And there is word, at this writing, that the Senate will not hold a vote until tomorrow, perilously close to the final hour.

Pres. Obama is facing intense criticism from his progressive base, many of whom are outraged that there was no agreement to roll back corporate subsidies and the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But Obama and Democratic leaders are saying the new bicameral committee, with equal representation from Republicans and Democrats, will have a very hard time dealing seriously with  future debt reduction, without raising new revenues, most likely through those kind of tax cuts—which have a very low rate of return on investment.

Tea Party activists are viewing the compromise bill as a capitulation by the Republican leadership, as they view the debt ceiling increase as a central policy aim of the Obama administration—however untrue that may be. Many of them appear to be—according to their public statements throughout the day—jockeying for position, in hopes of winning approval from leadership to vote no on a must-pass bill, the failure of which could sink the economy into a depression.

The House of Republicans is scheduled to vote this evening, and the coalition that is shaping up now looks increasingly to be the kind of broad, bipartisan coalition of unhappy souls that were always required to pass a debt ceiling increase in this political environment. There is, nevertheless, mounting suspense and spreading concern that hard-talking opponents among Tea Party Republicans and progressive Democrats may dissuade some moderates from supporting the deal.

List of Legislative Riders on H.R.2584, The Interior & Environment Approps bill for FY12
39 provisions in the bill specifically eliminate environmental protections in service of big polluters and GOP campaign donors

*In order as they appear in the bill, with section numbers cited.

Blocks Endangered Species Act Designations [Language on page 8]: Prohibits funding for Endangered Species Act listings or critical habitat designations.

Blocks NPS Boat Checks on Yukon River [Section 116]: Prohibits the National Park Service from carrying out boat inspection or safety checks on the Yukon River within the Yukon-Charley National Preserve in Alaska.

Blocks Agency Appeal of Grazing on Public Lands [Section 118]: Amends administrative appeal procedures for grazing on public lands to require parties to exhaust all administrative appeals before they may file suit in Federal Court.

Blocks Judicial Review of De-listing Wolves in Wyoming/Great Lakes [Section 119]: Protects from judicial review any decision of the Secretary of the Interior to de-list wolves in Wyoming or the Great Lakes region.

Blocks NEPA Review of Livestock Movement across Public Lands [Section 120]: Provides that for FY 2012 through FY 2014 the movement of livestock across public lands shall not be subject to NEPA review.

Requires BOEMRE Oil & Gas Permit Reporting [Section 121]: Requires Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement to keep detailed records and provide quarterly reports on any oil and gas permit or plan that was not approved by the agency.

Blocks Wild Lands Secretarial Order [Section 124]: Prohibits funding for the Wild Lands Secretarial Order announced by Interior Secretary Salazar last December. Proponents of the Secretarial Order argue that the Order is a reiteration of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 requirements for BLM management of federal lands with wilderness characteristics.

Allows for Export of Alaskan Western Cedar [Section 414]: Allows Alaskan western red cedar and yellow cedar to be sold for export. Current law requires such cedar to be used domestically.

Blocks NEPA Review of Extended Grazing Permits [Section 415]: Allows grazing permits to be extended without the required NEPA review in FY 2012 through FY 2016. In prior year’s appropriations, the extension of grazing permits was only for one year.

Extension of Forest Service Stewardship Program [Section 427]: Allows the Forest Service stewardship contracting program which under current law does not expire until September 30, 2013 to be extended through September 30, 2023.

Blocks Livestock Emissions Regulation [Section 428]: Prohibits funds for the promulgation or implementation of any regulation requiring a permit for emissions resulting from the biological processes of livestock production.

Blocks Greenhouse Gas Rule on Manure Management [Section 429]: Prohibits EPA from implementing a rule requiring reporting of greenhouse gases from manure management systems.

Blocks Greenhouse Gas Rule on Stationary Sources [Section 431]: Severely limits EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. For a one-year period EPA is prohibited from proposing or promulgating regulations to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from stationary sources. The language also prevents civil tort or common law lawsuits during this one-year period. Furthermore the language states that any permit applied for during the one-year period shall not be federally enforceable.

Blocks Update to Mountaintop Removal Mining Rule [Section 432]: Prohibits the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) from updating the Stream Buffer Rule. This is for the benefit of companies engaged in Mountaintop Removal Mining.

Blocks Mountaintop Removal Mining Policy at Multiple Agencies [Sec. 433]: Prohibits EPA, the Corps of Engineers, and OSM from implementing or enforcing any policy or procedure contained in two specified documents on Mountaintop Removal Mining.

Blocks Coal Ash Regulation [Section 434]: Prohibits EPA from regulating Fossil Fuel Combustion Waste (coal ash) under the Solid Waste Disposal Act.

Blocks Modification of Clean Water Act [Sec. 435]: Prohibits EPA from changing or supplementing guidance or rules related to the scope of the Clean Water Act.

Blocks Clean Water Act Regulations on Cooling Water Intake Structures [Section 436]: Prohibits EPA from developing, finalizing, implementing, or enforcing rules for facilities with cooling water intake structures.

Limiting Public Appeals [Section 437]: Changes the general administrative appeal process for the Forest Service to the less rigorous one contained in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003.

Blocks Storm Water Discharge Regulations [Section 439]: Prohibits regulations or guidance that would expand the storm water discharge program under the Clean Water Act to post-construction commercial or residential properties until after the EPA administrator submits a study to the Appropriations and authorizing Committees. The study must include overall cost as well as a cost-benefit analysis for various options.

Financial Break for Big Mining Companies [Section 440]: Amends the 1993 law establishing the Hardrock Mining Claim Maintenance Fee to provide a financial break for placer claims held by an association of two or more persons.

Allows for Texas’ Cap-and-Trade System [Section 441]: Provides that the EPA shall take no action to disapprove or prevent implementation of any flexible air permitting program. This provision was for the benefit of the State of Texas.

Blocks Grazing Management of Bighorn Sheep [Section 442]: Provides that through FY 2016 no action can be taken to manage Bighorn Sheep if such action would result in a reduction in the number of livestock allowed to graze upon a parcel.

Waives Clean Air Act Requirements for Big Oil Companies [Section 443]: Amends the Clean Air Act to (1) preclude EPA from requiring offshore sources to demonstrate compliance with health-based air quality standards anywhere but in a single onshore area; (2) reduce the length of time during which exploration platforms and drill ships are considered emission sources under the CAA, thereby limiting the time when emissions would be controlled; (3) make it impossible to use the permitting program to set emission control requirements for service vessels associated with offshore sources; and (4) replace a relatively fast, inexpensive process for citizens to challenge government action with a longer, more expensive review process in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This legislation passed the House on June 22, 2011 by a vote of 253-166.

Blocks Arsenic Cancer Study & Formaldehyde Risk Assessments [Section 444]: New authorization language requiring EPA to improve its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) seeking to draw doubt to the program that highlights health implications from environmental contaminants. The language stops the release of draft or final risk assessments that are not based on improvements in IRIS based on a National Research Council assessment of formaldehyde. Further requires the National Academy of Science to review EPA’s changes to IRIS and review risk assessments undertaken by EPA. The language goes on to limit funds for any action that would lower exposure levels below or within background concentration levels in ambient air, drinking water, soil, or sediment. Report language directs EPA to take no further action to post its draft cancer assessment of inorganic arsenic until the completion of the NAS study.

Removes Protection of Grand Canyon from Uranium Mining Claims [Section 445]: Prohibits the Secretary of the Interior from implementing a land withdrawal to protect the Grand Canyon from new uranium mining claims.

Blocks Forest Service Travel Management: [Section 446]: Prohibits the Forest Service from implementing Travel Management Plans in California until completion of an assessment of unauthorized routes. It further limits the classification of certain forest roads.

Blocks EPA Opinions on Pesticides [Section 447]: Prevents the EPA from using biological opinions related to pesticides and the Endangered Species Act, with a focus on ESA-listed salmon.

Blocks Clean Air Act Regulations of Cement Industry [Section 448]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to implement Clean Air Act regulations on the manufacture of Portland cement.

Blocks EPA Enforcement of Florida Water Quality Standards [Section 452]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to implement or enforce numeric Florida Water Quality Standards even though the state receives millions in federal funds for water projects.

Blocks EPA Greenhouse Gas Standard for Automobiles [Section 453]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to develop or finalize a new greenhouse gas standard for automobiles after model year 2016.

Blocks Clean Air Act Regulations of Fine Particles/Soot [Section 454]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to regulate certain levels of particulate matter in the air under the Clean Air Act.

Blocks EPA Regulation of Hard Rock Mining Operations [Section 455]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to develop additional financial assurance requirements for hard rock mining operations.

Requires BLM Notification of Land Exchanges [Section 458]: Amends the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 to require BLM and the Forest Service to provide written notification of land exchanges to adjacent landowners.

Blocks EPA Funds to Great Lake States due to Ballast Water Requirements [Section 459]: Prohibits certain Great Lakes states from receiving any EPA funding if they have adopted ballast water requirements that are more stringent than Coast Guard requirements. The Coast Guard believes this will block at least four Great Lake States from receiving any EPA funds.

Blocks EPA Guidelines on Misleading Pesticide Labels [Section 460]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to finalize guidelines on misleading information provided on pesticide labels.

Blocks Fictitious EPA Action on Ammonia Emissions[Section 461]: Prohibits funding for the EPA to develop or implement regulations related to ammonia emissions under the secondary standard for NOx and SOx.   EPA has already stated that it has no intention of doing so.

Blocks Clean Air Rules for Power Plants and Requires a Study That Ignores Public Health Benefit of the Clean Air Act [Section 462]: Directs the EPA to do a cumulative assessment of the impacts of EPA regulations, and prohibits funding for the “Utility MACT” and “Transport” rules.

Blocks Permit Requirements for Pesticide Discharge in Waterways [Title V]: Amends the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and the Clean Water Act to eliminate requirements for chemical companies and agriculture to obtain permits for pesticides entering waterways.

• From the Democratic minority of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations

Speaker of the House John Boehner has insisted on enforcing a strategy whereby his party dictates all federal budget policy, no matter the law, no matter the makeup of Congress, no matter the risks to the future of the United States of America. Now, after a wasted week of partisan isolationism and refusal to negotiate, he has passed a radical one-sided plan that will hurt most Americans, while doing little to solve the debt crisis or stave off a credit downgrade.

After the Bolshevik revolution swept away centuries of Russian imperial history, Vladimir Lenin’s regime adopted an attitude of benign demolition—the view that destruction was itself a creative force, allowing for positive change that could not otherwise happen. In today’s American political scene, a constitutional scholar, a moderate and a vocational negotiator now finds himself in pitched battle with a Republican House caucus that has adopted Lenin’s reckless approach to governing.

The new Tea Party freshmen in Congress have imposed on their party, on their speaker, on the American people, a politics of allegedly benign demolition. Claiming to be patriots who love austerity, they demand we burn the village—impoverish millions of Americans and slow down the economy for a generation—in order to save it. The argument seems to be that American democracy is wrong, negotiation is wrong, bipartisanship is wrong, and that the more severely the process of governing is obstructed, the better.

It is vitally important to note two key aspects of the bill that passed the House of Representatives on Friday:

1. It contained no constructive vision whatsoever for how to upgrade and sustain vital programs like Medicare and Social Security—only cuts;
2. It did not in fact meet the structural reform demands of most Republicans, but included steep cuts to programs that benefit citizens every day, including at least 39 different radical reversals to environmental protections…

In order to “motivate” the rogue element in the Republican caucus, Speaker of the House John Boehner played a clip from the Ben Affleck movie ‘The Town’, in which Affleck’s character says to a friend, in a somewhat desperate and ominous way: ”I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

The use of the clip was widely criticized as bizarre and reckless. The clip clearly suggested there could be value in doing harm to people. The use of the clip as a motivational tool clearly suggested there was a consensus view that hurting people could be a pleasurable bonding experience and a way to feel energized. In short, it seemed to many a shameless revelation of the leadership’s view that the radical first-years could only be brought on board with the promise that someone would be harmed.

Critics denounced the stunt as sadistic and out of bounds, a stain on the Congress. But the motif itself reflects a wider political strategy, by which deliberately harming and hampering the ability of the federal government to operate efficiently is seen as a constructive and patriotic act.

After three decades of one of the two parties committing its entire fiscal policy to the relentless and mounting reduction of taxes, revenues are now at an historic low, just over 14% of GDP—and that is with slow growth—budget policy has become about deprivation. Even in the face of extreme revenue shortfalls, at a time of grudging economic growth and facing a national default, the radicals who favor benign demolition remain convinced they are behaving in the interests of the same entity—the nation—they seek to save.

Under the pressure of pervasive consequence, however, the passion for forced austerity—coupled with a doctrine of oppose, obstruct and eliminate, at all costs—quickly degrades into uncontrolled heat and light, blinding those who argue that setting the building on fire will save it from collapse. In other words, the Republican House caucus has adopted Lenin’s reckless attitude of benign demolition, in which harming innocents is applauded as progress.

This is not news, at least not entirely. Mitch McConnell, who yesterday told Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate that he would not negotiate in any way with him, openly declared that he would dedicate his leadership of the Senate majority to the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. Since he made that declaration, it has become increasingly difficult to discern any substantive effort on his part to play a constructive role in economic stewardship.

It may seem extreme to suggest that the Republican party has committed itself to sabotaging the American economy in order to “destroy the Obama presidency” , but when there is little evidence to the contrary, the question has to be raised. And what is so dangerous, given that dynamic, is the train of thought that demands a brutal, painful rearrangement of priorities, and which favors the onset of calamity to make the pain seem like a sensible choice.

It is not in the tradition of American conservatism that the system should be driven to calamity in order to achieve narrow ideological goals that are harmful to the majority of people in material ways. It is not in the tradition of American democracy for one party to put the nation itself in jeopardy in order to get an edge over its opponents.

The House Republican caucus has an absolute moral obligation to abandon this slide into Leninist demolition tactics, and to propose constructive solutions that edify every vital program and protection the American people expect and deserve. Hurting people is not democracy; it is the absence of moral consideration.

Democracy requires service to, not sidelining of the people’s interest. The demolition of a century’s worth of progress toward fairness and personal security in the American economy is a departure from the ethical demands of legitimate government, and the people should be expected to judge such behavior harshly, at their next opportunity to express their will through the vote.

Less than two hours after the passage of House Republicans passed a hobbled version of “cut, cap and balance”, the Senate rejected the so-called Boehner plan. This now opens the field of negotiation for a weekend of heated, anxious, uncomfortable compromise debt plan negotiations, in both houses, as leaders attempt to cobble together broad bipartisan coalitions in both houses.

The fact that 59 senators voted against the Boehner plan is significant, because it reflects the analysis that has been building up throughout the debt negotiations, which is that in both houses, broad coalitions including members from both parties, in both cases a majority Democrats, will have to support legislation that Speaker Boehner and Leader Reid can both agree to and persuade Pres. Obama to sign.

Of the 59 votes against the Boehner plan, 6 were Republicans. If the Reid plan wins support from just 7 Republicans, it will be immune to filibuster and will become the must-pass plan for the House of Representatives. Boehner will have to persuade a majority of House members to vote for a bill that includes no new revenues—the demand of Democrats—and no balanced budget amendment—the demand of Tea Party Republican.

If Speaker Boehner were to join all of the Democrats and 22 of his fellow Republicans in voting for a compromise plan, they would have a majority, and the president could sign a bipartisan debt plan from both houses. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is allegedly refusing to speak to the majority leader, Harry Reid, and Speaker Boehner may have a hard time reversing course on a strategy that seems to be geared toward depriving Obama of his leadership role.

It has been suggested that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi might help Boehner muster the votes needed to pass a bipartisan plan. But there is no easy way to see how Mr. Boehner can maneuver out of the situation he is in. Just a week ago, amid news the Speaker was walking out of debt negotiations, the Senate rejected a proposal similar to, but more ambitious than the one rejected today. Boehner has, during that time, alienated much of his own party, and nearly every Democrat, and will likely have to make additional concessions to both sides to win a coalition vote.

There are now rumors of a challenge to his speakership from within the Republican party, and it remains unclear whether Mr. Boehner’s driving calculation has been to achieve a viable deal to raise the debt ceiling or to appear to do so while protecting his leadership position against more radical elements in his party.

One analysis suggests that Boehner might be well served to court Democratic support, and that he might even have gone as far to the right as he has in order to demonstrate the relevance of his leadership. Were Democrats to have to choose between Mr. Boehner and one of the Tea Party radicals, the might work to elevate and defend the speaker, to prevent further attacks on key Democratic priorities.

Another analysis suggests Democrats have outwitted the Republicans at the political maneuvering, driving a wedge through the heart of Republican party politics and sowing disarray and confusion among the House caucus. The relative calm of Senate Republicans, some say, is a sign they may see this dynamic playing out, and prefer to keep out of the fray.

By this analysis, Speaker Boehner is now caught between a Republican majority that no longer trusts his leadership and which fears the party may come apart and a Democratic minority that shares very few of his policy priorities, and which—led by the tough, experienced and effective Pelosi—might be ready to demand some serious concessions.

Even as Sen. McConnell and Speaker Boehner were accusing Democrats of watching from the sidelines, NPR reports the pressure was already back on Boehner for some sort of substantive compromise:

At the same time Reid appealed for bipartisanship, he and other party leaders accused Boehner of caving in to extremists in the GOP ranks — “the last holdouts of the Tea Party,” Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois called them.

Republicans conceded that the overnight delay had weakened Boehner’s hand in the endgame with Obama and Senate Democrats.

But Politico reports the House Republicans are planning to propose Sen. Reid’s measure in the House on Saturday, one to two days before it is expected to pass the Senate, in hopes of voting it down, effectively killing the two alternative legislative plans that remain available. Politico also reports there is expected to be little Republican support in the House for the Reid plan, though nearly every element of the plan is more in line with Republican than Democratic priorities. Democrats are expected to support it.

Should the Reid plan fail on Saturday, in the House, it would effectively call the president to action. He has said he will not allow the nation to default and he will not accept a plan that does not extend the debt ceiling far enough to prevent a credit downgrade, but he has not yet said he will invoke the 14th Amendment to prevent default or downgrade.

White House spokesman Jay Carney has said, over the last two days, that the grand bargain framework Speaker Boehner walked out on a week ago is still “on the table”. That measure included at least $800 billion in new revenues and as much as $4 trillion in deficit reduction and was expected to have support from both parties. Whether it would win a majority in either house is not yet clear.

After nearly two months of intense, relentless, high-pressure negotiations over whether and how to raise the ceiling for government borrowing, Speaker John Boehner’s debt-reduction plan passed the House of Representatives, with 218 Republican votes in favor, and 22 Republicans voting with all of the Democrats to oppose it. The measure is expected to fail, this evening, in the Senate.

Since Speaker Boehner walked out of talks last week, Sen. Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, has consistently said the limited “cut, cap and balance” model Boehner was trying to pass in the House would not get through the Senate. Yet after a week of corralling and cajoling his membership, Speaker Boehner passed precisely the plan neither Reid nor Pres. Obama intend to support.

The Senate plan is not yet ready for a floor vote, but Sen. Reid says he hopes to have it through the Senate by Sunday. This, however, leaves the entire world waiting as the foundation of the international financial system—the American Treasury bond—looks about to see its value sharply decreased by a national sovereign debt default and credit downgrade.

Rep. Boehner shouted angrily, as he spoke after the bill’s passage, that the fate of the nation was now in the hands of Pres. Obama and Leader Reid. Some expressed concern and surprise at his hostile tone, but given the opposition to his plan and the likelihood that he will be forced to endure even more withering attacks from all sides, before a final deal is reached, some say it is to be expected.

There is no report at this hour as to whether Rep. Pelosi, the House minority leader, and Speaker Boehner, have been discussing the necessary preparations for a complicated coalition vote, which will likely require both of them to make painful concessions that will anger some in their base. There is, however, mounting speculation that Pres. Obama may need to invoke the 14th Amendment ban on questioning outstanding debt, and institute a unilateral debt ceiling increase.

We will know more about what the weekend might look like, after the Senate has voted tonight.

The Republican party’s demand that any deal to raise the debt ceiling—normally achieved by passage of a single line of legislative text—include a balanced budget amendment is a complex tangle of distractions, rooted in campaign rhetoric and a desire to frustrate the process of economic recovery. The last constitutional amendment to pass, the 27th, was ratified by the states fully 203 years after it was introduced.

The process of amending the Constitution is a complex tangle of maneuvering and retrenchment that invites into the fray nearly every ideological bias and grudge. That tangle is notoriously difficult to unravel, to win consensus, because an amendment to the Constitution takes on supreme overriding value as against any number of statutory laws, the ramifications of which can be hard to quantify, and which can lead to many vicious partisan fights in the future, or, where the budget is concerned, to policy changes and unforeseen consequences that not even the amendment’s supporters would like.

State-level balanced budget amendments, like European Union deficit constraints, are guidelines that often result in dysfunctional—underfunded—government or even more problematic deficit crises, stemming from unusual accounting methods and bills passed in overly pressurized political environments. Many political observers in California blame much of the state’s ongoing budget crisis on the relative ease with which referenda are used to amend the state’s constitution, building in policy requirements that are not always—at first glance—an obvious result of the amendment.

Observers on Capitol Hill believe the balanced budget amendment demand is a non-starter in the Senate, and that it will only bring the United States closer to a catastrophic credit downgrade. Passage would require impossible two-thirds votes in both the House and the Senate, and then ratification by three-fifths of the states. It is impossible to pass such a plan by Tuesday, at which point the United States will go into default and see its credit downgraded.

Republicans are now being accused of electioneering, trying to use the debt crisis as a lever to inspire voter turn-out in the 2012 election. And some observers are complaining that Boehner did not propose this in any serious piece of legislation before this last-minute debt crisis was afoot. That analysis has led some to call the entire idea a stunt that is putting the nation in real fiscal jeopardy.

Around 10:52 am, the news emerged from Capitol Hill that Republicans were planning to change the controversial Boehner spending-cut bill, and call a floor vote some time today. There was speculation that House leaders were planning to cut funding for Pell Grants—needed financial aid for college students—in order to win the support of Tea Party radicals.

Pres. Obama gave a brief address, shortly before reports of a revamped Boehner bill came to light, calling on the American people to demand principled compromise from their representatives in both houses of Congress. He explained part of the dynamic that has been noticeably absent from the debt debate: that Boehner will need Democratic support in both houses.

The Speaker’s decision to continue his push for a one-party deal in the House of Representatives is being maligned by critics of both parties, and by financially minded observers who worry that allegiance to party ideology, or defense of his own leadership turf, may be putting the nation’s long-term economic solvency in jeopardy.

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein observed today that “Boehner’s need to protect his speakership tends to come ahead of his need to cut a deal.” Democratic House whip Steny Hoyer said that after Boehner and Cantor have walked out on talks three separate times, the House Republicans have now “walked out on Boehner”.

There is speculation that Boehner, long reputed to be a moderate and a deal-maker, may be hoping to outwit the Tea Party radicals, by giving them “red meat” to vote on, then letting the Senate alter the bill as much as is needed, then seeking Democratic support to pass the final deal in the House. There is no word that such a strategy has been discussed with Democratic leadership in either house.

Speaker Boehner has yet to offer a plan that meets the requirements of the Gang of Six or the bipartisan deficit commission, both of which called for major new revenues to guard against the economically deleterious effects of unprecedented spending cuts that will erase significant shares of GDP from the nation’s economic output.

It is unclear how Mr. Boehner intends to move any legislation through the House, given the divisive nature of the bill he has spent a week defending and promoting, despite the nearly universal view that it cannot pass both Houses in one form and be signed into law. Pres. Obama is now calling for the Senate to lead, and asking the American people to buttress the Senate’s work with demands that the House sign on to a bipartisan deal.

Speaker of the House John Boehner appears to have made an astonishing miscalculation in his legislative strategy, designing proposed legislation to be viable only in a 100% party-line vote, even though as many as 120 of his own members have vowed not to support raising the debt ceiling.

Speaker Boehner would need to round up only 21 Republican votes to pass a Democratic or bipartisan plan emerging from the Senate, were he able to rely on all of the Democratic members of the House. It would seem a more reasonable political calculation to work with the party that wants to make a deal than to struggle against all odds to win support from those who have vowed not to give it.

Democratic whip Steny Hoyer put it succinctly, quipping tonight that “The party of no is saying no to their own policy.” He added that the Republican policy of making radical demands in order to avoid default “is an immoral policy”. Hoyer said tonight “I’ve been in Congress 30 years, and I don’t know that I’ve been as concerned about the welfare of my country as I am tonight.”

Independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said tonight that “what is going on in the House right now is a disgrace and an outrage”. He asked how it could be that “the Congress is so far removed from what the American people want”, citing surveys that show people don’t want the deep cuts to entitlement programs now under consideration and that they do want taxes to rise for those earning more than $250,000 a year.

Speaker Boehner has not only failed to bring a viable piece of legislation to a vote, putting the nation’s fiscal integrity at risk, but he has managed the debt negotiations in a manner that has left the American public with the distinct impression that his party is not serious about solving the debt crisis.

And yet, there is a subtler way in which Boehner’s miscalculation could also harm his party. As the pressure mounts to make a deal, it becomes clearer that everyone is waiting for Tea Party radicals in the Republican party to decide whether or not the nation should be plunged into economic calamity, in service of ideological policy preferences.

That will obviously reflect badly on the Tea Party members involved in the standoff, but it will also make it harder for Republicans more broadly to win in 2012. Boehner could have avoided this crisis for the nation, and for his party, by working across the aisle, by letting the radicals know, with the same firm language he has used this week to demand cooperation, that he will not be held hostage and they can choose to make themselves relevant or not.

Boehner could have shown himself to be a statesman by cobbling together a “coalition of the willing”, comprised of moderates in both parties. Such a move would have elevated him as leader of the entire House of Representatives, worthy of the third highest office in the Constitutional order.

Instead, Mr. Boehner’s astonishing miscalculation now appears to have the nation hurdling toward debt default, credit downgrade, forced recession, and massive job loss, and his party torn and divided, his speakership in question, and Republican electoral chances sliding, by the day.

There is no constructive outcome to be gained from this debacle, and no clear way to explain why Mr. Boehner and his caucus would push the issue so far as to lose on so many fronts at the same time.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, and Democrats in the House, increasingly aware that Mr. Boehner will likely need Democratic votes to raise the debt ceiling, are reminding Mr. Boehner that the “grand bargain”, which would include new revenues, is still available. It is believed some version of that deal, with between $800 billion and $2 trillion in new revenues, could pass both houses, if Boehner can wrangle enough Republicans to vote with Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic minority.

At 10:27 pm, Rep. McCarthy, the House Republican whip, announced there would be no vote on the “Boehner bill” this evening. That marks four consecutive days that Mr. Boehner has been unable to get a vote on a piece of legislation that no one believes can pass the Senate.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has an admittedly difficult task, trying to corral rogue Republicans who have vowed to oppose raising the debt ceiling, even with the threat their actions could plunge the nation into an economic depression. But today, his speakership inched closer to calamity, as his push to pass a limited package of cuts, thought unlikely to prevent a credit downgrade, ended without a floor vote.

In what has been described as a partisan “pep rally”, one Republican House member has reportedly said the Boehner plan is an opportunity to “knock the s#!% out of them”. The obscenity, verging on threats of violence, continued the atmosphere of partisan “trench warfare” many have derided over the last several weeks, and seemed tied to a narrative of opposition to any constructive solution that would allow Pres. Obama to rescue the nation from a credit downgrade.

Despite the aggressive talk and the attempt to rally support from his party, Boehner appears not to have support in his party for any kind of debt deal. The failure to vote again raises the question of whether the Speaker of the House will be obliged to work with moderate Republicans and Democrats in the House, to pass legislation that would win support from the Democratic majority in the Senate and Pres. Obama.

Nancy Pelosi, known as the most determined and precise vote-counter on Capitol Hill, showed herself to be more in tune than Mr. Boehner, announcing even as he moved to bring his $917 billion plan to a vote that “the Boehner plan will not pass”. Even if it had been able to pass the House, it had no chance of passing the Senate, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a personal letter to Speaker Boehner, singed by 51 Democratic senators and two independents.

Even right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh decried the lack of political strategy in the Republican approach, which seemed more focused on forcing Democrats to not make a deal than on achieving a workable compromise. “The Democrats”, he said, “are two steps ahead here.”

Chris Matthews, commenting on the lack of a viable Republican debt plan, said the Republican party line seems designed “to threaten the destruction of the nation’s finances”.

There are now accusations that one of the provisions of the Boehner plan that raised the ire of Republican radicals is that it continues funding for Pell Grants, which help middle and low-income students finance their college education. Moderate Republicans have expressed frustration at the extremism of the opposition, and Democrats are accusing the hardliners of deliberately trying to kill programs that most Americans need and favor.

Observers on Capitol Hill suggest Democrats now perceive serious weakness in the Republican House caucus, and are more unified than they have been throughout the debate. Democrats in the Senate are now described as being aligned with Pres. Obama and determined to refuse any bill from the House that implements a short-term fix.

Some are also now saying there may be time to call for a vote and pass, in both Houses, with bipartisan coalitions excluding the radicals, the one-line debt ceiling increase bill that has been passed dozens of times before.

Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said tonight that the cuts being contemplated amount to four times the “negative stimulus” of any economic stimulus there was in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He warned that Congress needs to be aware that the cuts they are proposing will drain that amount of value from GDP, pushing the economy downward.

As of 10:00 pm, the Capitol Building and Congressional office buildings were still the focus of political reporters anxious to know whether the House would call a vote tonight or not. There were images of pizzas being brought through the security scanners, as plans appeared to be in motion for an all-night session focused on passage of a spending-cut package designed to secure House approval of an increase in the debt ceiling.

At 10:27 pm, Rep. McCarthy, the House Republican whip, announced there would be no vote on the “Boehner bill” this evening. That marks four consecutive days that Mr. Boehner has been unable to get a vote on a piece of legislation that no one believes can pass the Senate.

Bruce Bartlett, former deputy budget director for Pres. George H.W. Bush and aide to Pres. Reagan, says the Bush tax cuts have added at least $3 trillion to the debt, and other Bush policies led to an increase of $4 trillion in the debt.

When Bush took office, budget projections showed a $6 trillion surplus, enough to pay off the then pending $6 trillion national debt. Instead, by the time Bush left office, the national debt had ballooned to $13 trillion. Obama, he said, has only added about $1.4 trillion to the national debt, and all of that was either already projected or related to economic recovery.

Thus afternoon, he told Chris Matthews that the truth about Barack Obama’s budget policies to date is that “he is a moderate conservative”, not a liberal and certainly not a “socialist” as his critics allege. So much so, he added, that if he were a liberal Democrat, he would be very annoyed by Obama’s committed centrism.m

He expressed concern that nothing can get through the House of Representatives. He even went as far as to say that a good number of the Republicans in the House are “either stupid, ignorant or craven cowards”, and that he doubts they have the courage or the wisdom to act in service of their country.

Budget deficits have appeared to widen more than actual spending has, under Obama, because in order to impose fiscal discipline, and prevent wasteful spending on wars and unfunded programs, he move Bush’s off-the-books wars back onto the federal budget. The result has been the most substantive and far-ranging efforts the nation has seen to roll back the widening flood of long-term national debt.

Bartlett’s warning was concise, clear and deliberate: the Republicans are refusing to take responsibility for having driven the borrowing binge that put the nation in the hole it is now in. Had George W. Bush not slashed taxes, without any plan to pay for the revenue reductions, twice, the existing budget surplus would have paid down the debt.

He then added still more by entering into two multi-trillion-dollar wars, with zero funding, and a Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, also with zero funding, then setting in motion the most extensive burst of new borrowing in US history, to fund the bank bailouts.

Republican House speaker John Boehner has a choice that amounts to deciding where the weight of history will fall: he can lead a non-partisan effort to stave off a credit downgrade, and the massive ensuing costs of higher interest rates, which will drain both the people and their government of future revenues, or he can side with the radicals in his party who openly celebrate their quest to violate the Constitution and drive the government into default.

He can choose to be a leader of courage and principle, or to follow the radical freshmen already calling for his ouster.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) today addressed the Senate, calling for reasoned cooperation between the two parties and the two chambers, to craft a serious budget deal that can avoid a credit downgrade. He admonished hardline Republicans in the House to recognize that the Constitution they have sworn allegiance to institutes checks and balances, that no one party or ideology gets to rule without a contest of ideas.

“The attitude of some of these members in the House that it’s my way or let’s drive our country over the cliff is as dramatically un-American as anything I’ve ever seen,” Warner said firmly. His message comes at a time when House Republicans appear to moving further away from a grand bargain that can win support from both parties and make substantial changes to bring the debt-to-GDP ratio back within reason.

Warner made two important observations that have been almost totally absent from the debt negotiations so far:

He pointed out that Republicans who say they want the federal government to be “run like a business” seem to overlook the fact that any business with sound leadership would look to increase its revenues to fix a budget gap, not just to slash spending and undermine its productive capacity.

He then noted that it seemed odd that anti-tax radicals have sworn they will never vote to increase revenues or raise the debt ceiling, yet not doing so will cause a credit downgrade, which will lead to higher interest rates for all Americans, possibly depriving Americans of more than they would lo to tax hikes.

What’s worse, and Sen. Warner did not mention, is that the interest rate hike would take money out of everyone’s pockets, slow down the economy and hinder job creation, it would give much of that money to foreign-owned banks, corporations and to foreign governments like China and Saudi Arabia.

There would be measurable productive value in giving that money to the American government, to deal with debt and deficits, to make our spending policy more rational and more balanced, but no productive value whatsoever in sending it overseas.

At present the Republican party has yet to present a single, viable debt and deficit reduction package that meets the standard for avoiding a credit downgrade and forcing hundreds of billions in American taxpayers’, consumers’ and households’ dollars to fund non-productive spending on higher interest rates.

Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker has signed into a law a controversial requirement that voters present photo ID in order to exercise their right to vote. Now, he has announced plans to close as many as 16 motor vehicle offices, every one of them in districts that favor Democrats. What’s more, Walker’s plan includes expanding hours at facilities where Republicans are more likely to obtain their driver’s license or photo ID.

Democratic leaders say the move is clearly designed to deny photo ID to voters more likely to vote Democratic, and then deny them the right to vote. It is the latest in a series of policy changes, enacted by Gov. Walker and the brothers Fitzgerald, the Republicans who control the legislature, specifically designed to make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections, beginning with what many say was an illegal legislative maneuver to strip public servants of basic labor rights.

More than one top Wisconsin Republican openly stated in televised interviews that the collective bargaining ban was specifically designed to “break the unions” or to “crush the Democrats”. This latest move comes as Walker’s government is releasing a radical redistricting map, changing all of the borders of every district in the state, just before voters are scheduled to cast votes to recall six Republican state senators—an effort critics say is designed to confuse voters.

When asked by Current’s Keith Olbermann whether it was an exaggeration to classify Walker’s actions as “fixing an election”, John Nichols referred him to the history of the infamous Boss Tweed and 19th century New York City’s Tammany Hall, to this day viewed as possibly the most significant example of pervasive and outright public corruption in US history. Tweed’s methods were similar in many ways to Walker’s, nibbling around the edges to get the outcome he wanted.

Scott Walker’s term has been laced with one after another accusation of corruption and abuse of office. As protests mounted in Madison, against the bid to strip the state’s public servants of collective bargaining rights, Walker attempted to mobilize the National Guard against the demonstrators, attempted to have protesters arrested for free speech, illegally sealed the state Capitol building, and is accused of using state troopers to harass and intimidate the families of Democratic legislators who fled the state to deprive Walker’s Republicans of a legislative quorum in the Senate.

He named the father of the Fitzgerald brothers—who control both houses of the state legislature—to be head of the state police. And it was the father of the two men he was counting on to carry out illegal actions in the legislature to force through votes on a rights-stripping measure, designed to undermine unions and give Republicans and edge in elections, that he asked to send troopers to the homes of individuals he knew to be out of the state, to harass their families.

It was alleged in more than one report that Scott Walker was considering ordering the state police to attack demonstrators in order to disperse the crowds, with multiple top police commanders calling for restraint and saying they would not recognize such a scene as American democracy.

Some state police joined the protesters in denouncing Walker’s actions as corrupt and undemocratic. On February 25, 2011, FireDogLake published this report:

Rainforest Action Network’s Jenn Breckenridge posted around 8:00 p.m. EST that the Wisconsin State Police had arrived at the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, joining the protesters in solidarity against Gov. Scott Walker and his attack on state employees’ collective bargaining.

The move may have come in response to an apparent order by the state’s assembly to close the capitol building at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday. RAN’s Ryan Harvey said the state police are rejecting the order and are planning to sleep in the building along side the protesters.

The police officer says in this video, “Let me tell you Mr. Walker, this is not your house, this is all our house.”

When a critic staged a fake call from one of the Koch brothers, who were spending millions to help finance the Republican response to the massive Madison protests, Gov. Walker accepted a gift in kind, in the form of an expensive vacation, as a reward for his hard work. And allegations of corruption only mounted.

According to the watchdog site Scott Walker Watch:

Thanks to the great work by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, it has become apparent that dozens of Walker supporters were illegally donating more that the $10,000 limit in campaign contributions during the 2010 election season.

There is now an official complaint against Gov. Walker and his campaign, for seeking and accepting illegal contributions.

With mounting evidence that a significant portion of the Walker governing agenda is going toward rigging the 2012 election to favor Republicans, critics and election watchdogs are now calling for an investigation into election tampering and voter suppression.

A recall petition is almost certain to emerge after the one-year-in-office requirement is met. Already, there are petitions circulating calling for a bid to recall him. One accuses him of “economic treason” for what many view as a war against the middle class. Over 11,000 people have already joined a Facebook page devoted to removing Gov. Walker from office.

The pro-business lobbying organization ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) has actually gone as far as to pair corporate interests with Republican legislators interested in working with them, to essentially push legislation written by industry. John Nichols, reporting for the Nation, writes:

“Never has the time been so right,” Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington told conservative legislators gathered in Washington to plan the radical remaking of policies in the states. It was one month after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans had grabbed 680 legislative seats and secured a power trifecta—control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in twenty-one states. Ellington was speaking for hundreds of attendees at a “States and Nation Policy Summit,” featuring GOP stars like Texas Governor Rick Perry, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Convened by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—“the nation’s largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators,” as the spin-savvy group describes itself—the meeting did not intend to draw up an agenda for the upcoming legislative session. That had already been done by ALEC’s elite task forces of lawmakers and corporate representatives. The new legislators were there to grab their weapons: carefully crafted model bills seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all agenda on the states.

The radical Walker agenda has many of the hallmarks of such model bills, and his Republican majority has been accused of selling its role as legislative majority, in exchange for financial support from industry. There are calls for a comprehensive corruption investigation into the dealings of the Wisconsin Republican party, to look into illegal campaign fundraising activity, illegal legislative process, potential quid-pro-quo, abusive of power and extortion.

There is even an allegation that Mr. Walker had been illegally funneling low-interest government bonds to his employer—BP Rifinery, in Whatcom County—for as long as 10 years. While he was able to deliver $180 million in low-interest bonds to that one entity, all other businesses in the county received only $13 million of the same bonds.

It is alleged Walker routinely manipulated the process for debate and for public hearings, to obscure a decision-making process that was flagrantly corrupt and which would have raised opposition from the community, from businesses and from the federal government.

While House and Senate leaders are now moving away from Pres. Obama’s $4 trillion debt deal, proposing far less in real long-term debt and deficit reduction, Standard and Poors is threatening to downgrade the nation’s credit rating for bond sales. The rating agency is demanding $4 trillion in deficit reduction, calling for a plan that will put the debt trajectory on a “sustainable path”.

The Boehner plan, which aims for $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, with the possibility of $1.8 trillion later, will not meet the S&P standard for sustainable deficits. The Reid plan, which calls for $2.7 trillion in spending cuts, also falls short, but is thought to operate in part on the assumption that some of the Bush tax cuts will expire next year, leading to at least $1 trillion in additional revenue.

Pres. Obama is caught in a difficult spot, as he will likely have to sign whatever emerges from Congress, or else take unilateral action under the so-called constitutional option (Article II, bolstered by the 14th Amendment). He is almost certain to use any Congressional failure to bring in new revenues as grounds for an aggressive campaign to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

But that is not certain to calm concerns at credit rating agencies about the solvency of the American government, in terms of meeting its bond-repayment obligations. There is also the problem of collateral economic damage, which will further slow revenue growth and put still more pressure on the government’s ability to repay.

What seems clear at this stage, as the Congressional switchboard is overwhelmed with calls and web servers are crashing, is that the Boehner plan falls desperately short of what is required, and is unlikely to win support in the Senate. Reid’s plan is also insufficient, and sure to alienate much of the Democratic party’s base, by not asking for any new revenues to complement the massive proposed spending cuts.

Observers have expressed dismay and amazement at the slow pace of negotiations, with Speaker Boehner quitting negotiations last Thursday evening, and scheduling no vote for his new plan, which essentially rules out any compromise, until Wednesday at the earliest, leaving just three business days before default and virtually guaranteeing a credit downgrade, whatever final agreement is made.

If the leadership of the House of Representatives does not craft a bill that can work as a bipartisan compromise that will pass both houses, and be signed into law, they will be knowingly imposing on the entire American economy a steep “tax”, in the form of rapidly escalating interest rates. Those interest rate increases will impose a real and measurable cost inflation on all interactions with the economy.

Once the nation’s credit rating is downgraded, Treasury bond interest rates will have to go up, and those interest rates will push all other interest rates higher, choking off credit to consumers, families and businesses. And the negative impact will multiply, by very simple logic: will for-profit entities—i.e. banks—who make their profit from interest not only increase interest rates, but increase them enough to pad their profits, if basis rates go up?

The Republican party’s tempting of markets to react to imminent default is not only a “dangerous game”; it is a reckless experiment in the deliberate, long-term degradation of the American economy. It will pose an “across the board” threat to American enterprise, and literally undermine—take the legs out from under—the still slow and tenuous recovery. It will also make permanent some of the driving dynamics of the slow jobs economy.

How? By building into our economic fabric a degraded credit rating, the Boehner-Cantor default will make all government borrowing, indeed all borrowing of any kind, more expensive. This cost increase will not be temporary, as it will propagate the fiscal dysfunction currently at work in the budget process to the entire economy, forcing every man, woman and child in the United States to fund unnecessarily high interest payments.

The burden Republican radicals say they want to put a stop to—the ever-increasing share of the federal budget going to interest payments—will be expanded to all American businesses, households and individuals. Banks will find it harder to make money, as fewer and fewer people are able to meet the threshold for borrowing, and so will push for still higher ROI on ever riskier, and/or less frequent lending.

Republican leaders might object to calling their singularly engineered default, and resulting interest rate hikes, as a tax, but in the sense of imposing a heavy added cost burden on the American people—not to mention the Republican rhetorical flourish wherein everything other than free cash for business is a tax hike—it is.

The cost of living will go up, even as employment opportunity narrows, and wages continue to fall, when adjusting for inflation. Credit will become more scarce, threatening to halt an extremely feeble housing recovery, and to put still more home buyers “underwater”. States will see more pressure to lower property taxes, to mark to market, even as banks fight to avoid the same fate.

There will be more layoffs at the federal and state level, and vital incentives for businesses will begin to dry up, as federal and state budget hawks take note of how difficult it is to finance such incentives through new borrowing. Today, the IMF chief warned that a US credit downgrade could do severe harm to the entire global economy—blocking yet another source of potential income for American businesses and investors.

While anti-tax radicals in the GOP are convinced that a default will be the jolt to the system they need to remake American fiscal policy in a way that spurs economic growth, it will in fact be the single most effective way to insure the contagion of fiscal dysfunction and escalating long-term economic burden to entities large and small that—unlike the US government—cannot afford to bear that burden for even a little while.

The Boehner-Cantor default tax will, in fairness, also be in large part attributable to Rep. Paul Ryan’s radical budget proposal, which itself was rooted in a number of fiscal policy fantasies, chief among them that cutting spending automatically creates jobs, spurs growth and increases revenues, even if tax rates are slashed at the outset.

Ryan’s plan took all of the wrong lessons from the fiscal policy of the Reagan years, amounting to—according to some critics—an irrationally rosy rewriting of history, in the hopes that money and economics will just be different in this next go-round. More specifically: Ryan confused tax cutting with economic growth. He made the assumption that a government small enough so as to be unable to aid in fostering economic health and wellbeing would somehow do so magically.

He forgot to take note of the many tax increases Reagan was forced to sign, in order to make sure the nation did not fall into depression and loses its competitive edge against the Soviet Union, as a result of his radical tax cuts. He forgot to take note of how necessary Reagan made “deficit spending” to the shape and function of our national government and our economy more broadly.

Ryan proposed, essentially, a more radical version of Reagan’s failed policy, ignoring the fact that his plan would ultimately drive the government into far more long-term borrowing, or necessitate a dramatic decline in GDP and key areas of medium to long-term investment. So, it could be a Boehner-Cantor-Ryan tax, but it is Boehner and Cantor who made Mr. Ryan’s radicalism seem mainstream, sparking a misguided intransigence among their own caucus.

The default, if it comes, will be owned by Messrs. Boehner and Cantor, who have, between them, walked out of talks at least three times, simply because they refused to even listen to alternative ideas. And they did so in service of a radical minority of one party, who have already vowed not to assist in avoiding economic chaos.

Polling now shows clearly that while Pres. Obama suffers from an economic approval rating below 50%, that number might be more about incentivizing action than about policy preferences. Recent polls also show a majority of the American people have more faith in Mr. Obama than in either party’s Congressional leadership, to deal with debt and deficits.

Polling also reveals that while nearly 60% of the public believe George W. Bush’s economic policies inflicted lasting harm on the economy, only 37% believe Barack Obama’s policies have caused harm. The suggestion is that the public is more aware of who is offering viable solutions, and who is acting in good faith, than partisan dividing lines would ordinarily allow.

Meanwhile, the new Republican majority has succeeded in driving anti-incumbency sentiment to its highest rate on record, after just six months in control of the House of Representatives. They have lost two important House elections this year already, as the message that they are pushing a radical agenda to eliminate Medicare, while introducing zero pieces of legislation to create or incentivize the creation of even one new job, is sticking.

But all of that is politics. The economic reality is that a Boehner-Cantor-driven default will add measurable, possibly prohibitive new costs to everyday activities, personal and commercial investments and leave the nation with unmanageable new operating costs, slowing economic growth and threatening our standing in the global economy.

At least 80, possibly as many as 120 House Republicans have now vowed they will vote against raising the debt ceiling, no matter what the makeup of the compromise reached, no matter the consequences for the economy, for national security, or for America’s future. Speaker John Boehner is caught between a rock and a … well, the smart thing would be for him to work with Democrats, so he can pass something serious and save the country from an economic disaster of his own making.

Speaker Boehner has the authority—and the good fortune to be living in a country where this is possible, politically—to abandon the irresponsible “blow-it-up” caucus in his own party, and work across the aisle to craft serious legislation that will pass and that will work. The 80 to 120 Republicans who are vowing to vote for the deep economic degradation of their country have no role in these negotiations, as they have already bowed out. Mr. Boehner cannot and will not have their votes, which means that the only way he can pass a compromise is to win support from a majority of Democrats.

The Republican majority is forfeiting its majority, and the Speaker of the House is now truly in a position to lead. He can demonstrate that leadership does not come with a false or pigheaded “consistency”, and that members of Congress who swear an oath which necessitates, in part, not doing their jobs in tough binds, cannot be and will not be taken seriously by serious people.

In fact, since they are clearly and resoundingly declaring that this—not raising the debt ceiling, no matter the cost to the American people—is their one and only most personally important goal, they may not be here after 2012 anyway. They will not help Speaker Boehner build a continuing speakership.

Mr. Boehner said yesterday on Fox News Sunday that he did not come to Washington “to be a Congressman”; he came to “do what is right for the country”. Given the cruel bind he now finds himself in, that remark sounded for all the world like a dare to his party to oust him if they could. It was the one strong moment in a weak and sometimes nonsensical series of claims, and it was kind of leadership he should show in the Congress itself.

His allegiance to party must come second to his allegiance to the people of the United States. Inviting calamity is not governing. Tempting fate is not a plan. And charting a course for the jagged cliffs and high seas of default is not fiscal sanity. We know: if there is no agreement by August 2, it will become more expensive, not less, to borrow money, and those higher interest rates will filter through the entire economy.

At the 11th hour of the 24th day of July, just a week before actual default, Speaker Boehner seemed prepared to abandon all reason and craft a new Republican-only solution, in isolation, with no guarantee from the Senate that it could pass. But there are reports Leader Reid and Pres. Obama are both in touch with Speaker Boehner, and are working to ensure a deal goes through.

The problem Boehner faces is that a large number of his own members will not vote for it. He needs Democratic votes, and a lot of them. Whether he likes it or not, the Speaker who would have a one-party House of Representatives is now leader of an awkward, grudging, unlikely coalition of friends and enemies, and he may not so easily distinguish between the two.

There are now less than 8 days until default.

The Speaker is crafting a new “cut, cap and balance” plan, without the cap or the balance parts. He is almost sure to lose more Republicans than just those who have already vowed to vote against any increase in the debt ceiling. And Democrats are unlikely to vote for anything that resembles “cut, cap and balance”. Many have said they will not support anything that touches entitlements without also raising taxes on the rich.

Plus, “cut, cap and balance” was never a serious plan to deal with the debt:

• Most glaringly, required an impossible super-majority in BOTH houses of Congress, in order to pass a constitutional amendment, which would then have to be ratified by two-thirds of all the states;
• It also made little sense, arithmetically: to cut spending—without a plan to pay down outstanding obligations—, cap borrowing—making this more difficult—, then impose a balanced budget—when so much of our economic wellbeing depends on the borrowing power of our government and the security of Treasury bonds—doesn’t add up;
• Speaker Boehner knew it would never pass the Senate and would never be signed into law.

Given the Senate’s position that there should be $2 trillion in new revenue, it would seem Speaker Boehner is, at least for this coming week, Republican in name only, and the de facto leader of a coalition dominated by Democrats. They are sure to frustrate his triumphant spending-cut-only plan with a demand for new revenues; some moderate Republicans might remind him that if the Bush tax cuts are not dealt with in this deal, taxes might go up by far more than the $400 billion over ten years that caused him to walk out of talks last week.

So the question remains: What can you say yes to? Ultimately, the American people are saying they trust Pres. Obama more than they trust Congressional leaders, to deal responsibly with this issue. They trust him to make political sacrifices in order to save the nation’s economy and standing in the world. He may say yes to a bad deal, because that would be the right thing to do. But Speaker Boehner cannot long stand as leader of his party, if he is so willing to be dominated by non-participating back-benchers and Tea Party freshmen.

There is no productive economic value, tested or in theory, to the radical Republican faction’s view that “blowing it up”—an unfortunately violent metaphor—will somehow cure the government of all the ills they reflexively see at every turn. There is no substance, no evidence, no viable strategy, in the plan to let the nation default, then see what happens.

The United States would not be the first nation to default; it would only be the biggest and most indispensable. Default would:

1. Cause 44% of US government obligations to go unpaid;
2. Cause a Constitutional crisis—the Constitution essentially forbids knowingly entering into default;
3. Cause an immediate decline in GDP, first from the 44% of obligations unpaid, then from the massive new “credit crunch” of rapidly increasing interest rates;
4. Cause massive job loss, first in the public sector, then by extension in the private sector;
5. Cause a deep new recession, possibly a depression, while staunching the borrowing power of the government to speed or incentivize recovery;
6. Give immense new power, over American government policy, to foreign creditors, like China.

Yes, Republicans who are currently voting to throw the nation’s government into default are voting to give the totalitarian Communist regime that rules China, our largest creditor, unprecedented influence over American government policy.

Let us be clear: the world has seen defaults before. When Argentina defaulted, there was a run on the banks, massive business interests collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of its 40 million citizens left the country to start from scratch as immigrants elsewhere. If the same thing happens in the “land of opportunity”, where will everyone go?

The nation will be saddled with crushing economic ripple effects, even as the government is prevented from acting to resolve the crisis, and for the first time in our history, one party in Congress will have voted to give a foreign power, astonishingly, power over our policy.

The radicals seem unfazed by this bleak picture; Speaker Boehner cannot be unfazed. He stands at a crucial moment in history, his entire tenure in Congress, and certainly his speakership, about to be defined by what might be the most tragic error in judgment in living memory, on the part of our legislative branch. He will long be viewed by history as the man who steered the nation to calamity or worked with his rivals to right the ship of state.

So, the true bipartisan coalition that needs to emerge, if anything is to pass both houses and be signed into law by August 2, must have the following characteristics:

1. It must push back the next debt ceiling vote until 2013;
2. It must not make cuts into Medicare or Social security that are not paid for with new revenues;
3. It must take hundreds of billions of waste, fraud and abuse out of Pentagon spending;
4. It must include stepped up financial regulatory enforcement, to prevent abuse and win judgments;
5. It must ease the nation off the debt-ceiling model, instead establishing debt-reduction targets and a “safe threshold” measure for future borrowing as a percentage of GDP;
6. It must achieve roughly $2.7 trillion or more in out-year spending reductions, while not cutting deeply into current GDP.

IndependentsOfPrinciple :: House Speaker John Boehner appears to be under attack from an intransigent House Republican caucus that will not allow him to retain any credible leadership if he agrees to a debt and deficit reduction plan that includes any tax increases of any kind. While select Republicans in the Senate agree with the deficit commission recommendations and the Gang of Six proposal—which recognizes the need to increase revenues to deal with escalating deficits—, radicals refuse to agree to any compromise.

It seems Speaker Boehner is being held hostage by a radical Tea Party revolt in his party, whom he is not prepared to anger. Part of the problem is rhetorical. On issues of debt, deficit, entitlements and security, routine use of hyperbole has so distorted debate, that much political discourse now distorts what is actually happening in policy. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (OK) told Meet the Press, falsely, that “the government is twice as big as it was ten years ago; it’s thirty percent bigger than it was when Pres. Obama took office.”

What Coburn is speaking about is the federal budget, and nearly the entire amount of the increases he cites are security related—specifically the costs of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with increases in Pentagon spending. Pres. Obama added massive new numbers to the federal budget, without adding any new spending, simply by reporting, for the first time, the spending for Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the budget.

Such distorted rhetoric, treating cost as “the size of government”, leads many conservatives to the mistaken view that tax dollars are being foolishly wasted on unnecessary programs, new hires, and intrusions into personal freedom. In fact, there are fewer government employees now than when Pres. Obama took office; in fact, Democrats are proposing sweeping reforms designed to reduce long-term debt and deficits; in fact, it is failure to fund the government that is causing the deficit to expand.

Sen. Coburn also repeated on Meet the Press the right-wing myth that Pres. Obama has been “unwilling to deal with entitlements”. When Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform process called for saving $500 billion in Medicare fraud, waste and abuse,  over 10 years, Republicans ran vicious and false ads against him, claiming he was trying to “gut Medicare” and “cut benefits” for the elderly. In fact, it has been Pres. Obama who has repeatedly proposed targeted Medicare reform, designed to roll back costs without cutting benefits.

“Entitlements” is another keyword in the rhetorical distortion of Washington politics: entitlements are programs which some citizens are “entitled to” because they have funded them. By paying into Social Security and Medicare, or by virtue of one’s military service, one accumulates benefits that come later in life. There are many benefits to society of such a system, and the “entitlement” factor in the equation is really, and should be thought of as earned benefits.

Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and SCHIP—which provides health insurance to underprivileged children—operate on a different logic. But, there is no way to eliminate spending on these without causing real and measurable harm to the overall economy. Even these “entitlement” programs are really designed to optimize the public cost of certain failures of the marketplace to optimize costs. Our public discourse on “entitlements” is almost entirely driven by a narrow ideological view that anyone receiving entitlements is a parasite.

In this climate, Speaker Boehner is trapped between the reason of the vast majority of people, who believe we cannot solve the mounting deficit crisis without addressing revenue shortfalls and the unreason of a radical Tea Party faction, a minority even of his own party, that will not support any increase in taxes, no matter the potentially virtuous impact on the nation’s economic fabric.

Last week, Boehner tried to move his position closer to a “grand bargain”, with Pres. Obama, who has sought to meet the demand of that reasoned majority; since Friday, he appears trapped behind a wall of intransigence, not of his own construction. Much of this may stem from the hardcore ideologically wishful mythologies that prevail in the use of rhetoric to deal with debt and deficit issues.

Doris Kearns Goodwin said, today, that people in the political center are often neglected by the heated political rhetoric that prevails in ideological debate. She noted that some have called for “raging centrists” who can represent the true voice of independents. Boehner has sought to be the skilled negotiator and the leader wise enough to recognize a good deal when he sees one, but it now appears his party will not allow him to lead in that way.

There are questions about whether the Boehner speakership is in jeopardy, whether his party will challenge his leadership, if he strays from their 2012 election strategy, which involves a programmatic refusal to cooperate with Pres. Obama. More radical Tea Partyists have adopted the irresponsible “blow it up” view, which holds that forcing default will ruin the government and allow them to rebuild it, according to their ideological preferences.

For the record, Tim Pawlenty proudly says he “did blow it up” when he was governor of Minnesota, leading to a debilitating government shutdown, the furlough of thousands of workers, negative impact to his state’s economy, and higher borrowing costs that could weigh on the state’s budget for years. Economists agree that default would be catastrophic, and would lead to higher borrowing costs, exacerbating the problem and doing serious long-term harm to the wider economy.

Andrea Mitchell said it is hard for her to understand how over 200 members of the House of Representatives swear an oath to refuse to raise taxes, before even evaluating the wisdom of specific policies on which negotiation will be necessary. Historically, being a good legislator means being able to make the deal that moves official policy in the direction of your agenda. Many, including Republicans, are now urging Speaker Boehner to abandon the Tea Party radicals and work with moderate Republicans and Democrats to stave off catastrophic default.

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory quoted Winston Churchill, who said “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” Many political analysts believe we could do better, if there were more consideration given to non-ideological positions, which may actually represent the views of most Americans, regardless of their partisan voting habits.

Independent voters are often credited with leading the debate from the political center, but have been boxed out of all talk on debt and deficit, with ideological distortions applied to polling numbers to obscure their views. The debt-ceiling negotiations have thrown into high contrast the implied obligation that House Speaker Boeher join Pres. Obama and Senate Leader Reid as three principled centrists negotiating, as Boehner today told Chris Wallace, to do “what’s right for the country,” regardless of party preferences.

ABC News political correspondent Jonathan Karl today tweeted: “Boehner will face a revolt of his own leadership for grand bargain that increases revenue by 800B. Am told Cantor&McCarthy are opposed.” Mr. Boehner finds himself pressed by history to be a principled centrist, but standing alone between reason and unreason, and under attack from his own party. He may even be facing the threat of a challenge from Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has used the debt debate to reposition himself as an ally of the Tea Party.

Speaker Boehner did, however, say today that he did not come to Washington to “be a Congressman”, but to “do what is right for the country.” And he may now have to choose between the two. The question is, ultimately, whether the American people can find a way to expand the space for the voice of reason, and reward principled moderates who make political sacrifices in service to “what is good for the country”.

In a bizarre interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, House Speaker John Boehner appeared embattled, distracted and without a firm grip on any solution to the debt ceiling crisis. He seemed to be unable to speak about the debt ceiling crisis in any truthful manner, repeatedly attacking Pres. Obama for not being willing to make a deal, despite Obama offering far more than any president, Democratic or Republican, in debt and deficit reduction, in fact offering far more than Boehner himself was seeking.

Boehner seemed to be bound by certain hostile factions within his caucus, and insisted that he would not accept any plan that was not some variation of “cut, cap and balance.” He appeared frustrated, even shaken, by the failure the House Republican plan—crafted with no consultation with Democratic members of either chamber—failed to pass the Senate.

Wallace reminded him: “The Senate resoundingly tabled the idea of a balanced budget amendment; you’re not going to insist on that again, are you?” Boehner repeated, almost robotically, that he would insist, come what may, on a “framework” based on “cut, cap and balance”, Boehner refused to answer whether he would attempt to force a balanced budget amendment—which, incidentally, could not be made law by August 2 and would, in and of itself, do literally nothing to reduce debt or deficits—as part of a bipartisan framework.

The speaker insisted repeatedly that he was aiming to achieve a “bipartisan framework”, only to specify that his bipartisan framework would not and could not stray in any way from the Republican plan. There is no Democratic support for the so-called “cut, cap and balance” proposal, which has been evaluated as potentially exacerbating spending and deficits, making borrowing more costly in the future and making government spending more wasteful.

Chris Wallace reminded Boehner that he was willing to agree to $800 billion in new revenues, despite his pledge not to raise tax rates. Boehner claimed to know that with specific adjustments to the tax rates would yield $800 billion in new revenues without any tax increase. In fact, he seemed to indicate he was able to reduce expected government revenues by law to as much as $2.7 trillion, and yet take in as much as $800 billion in additional revenues, due to the economic viability of that new tax policy.

“There is considerable criticism among House Republicans”, said Wallace, that Boehner was too eager to make a “grand bargain” with Pres. Obama, and to raise taxes. Boehner seemed to indicate frustration with his own party, for the first and only time during the interview, explaining that his only aim was to do “what is right for the country.”

Boehner added: “I didn’t come here to be a Congressman; I came here to do something for my country… I’m going to do everything I can to do the right thing for our country.” Though he had indicated that he and Obama might be “from different planets”, he said “I always work with the glass half full. I’m always an optimist. It’s about finding common ground,” said Boehner.

Boehner’s commitment to “finding common ground” is now widely in question, as a result of his repeated walking out of talks, his insistence that “bipartisan” means Democrats must adopt a Republican plan, and his irrational claim that the president’s plan, the Gang of Six plan, the bipartisan Senate plan, the recommendations of the deficit commission, were not plans at all, and that only the House’s “cut, cap and balance” plan had any validity.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: The Bipartisan Policy Center has found that if there is no agreement to raise the debt limit by August 2, the Treasury Department would fail to pay 44 percent of its obligations. That 44 percent of government spending, over a year, is equivalent to a real decline in GDP of 10 percent.

The number is that high because the Treasury Department has been making fiscal adjustments since March, in order to stave off default. Those adjustment have been pushed as far as possible and cannot continue to push back the deadline, beyond August 2.

Some analysts suggest the Treasury Department’s efforts since March mean the United States government is already, in some sense, in default, and that only with a rapid increase in new borrowing and new tax revenues, can the nation actually avoid that default coming fully to the fore.

The complexity of the budget crisis becomes somewhat simpler, when one looks at the direct impact of default on GDP. Even before we look at the indirect, ripple-effect impact on GDP, we know that a 44% decline in spending will constitute a 10% decline in GDP. That immediate impact on economic growth will plunge the nation into recession.

That new recession will be made far more severe by the financial industry ripple effect, as borrowing costs rapidly escalate, and homeowners, consumers and businesses, even major banks and investment banks, find it more expensive to borrow money to fund their lives and/or operations.

Job creation is sluggish already because banks are still not lending as readily as they did before the financial industry collapse of 2007-2008. And critics warn the banking industry has still not covered the gap between the wealth it claimed to hold—and so the obligations it took on—and the wealth actually available to the marketplace.

That imbalance slows the flow of capital to borrowers, meaning that only record-low interest rates make it possible for banks to keep lending. If interest rates begin to rapidly escalate, due to a combination of government default, a downgraded credit rating, and reduced demand for government bonds, the flow of capital to borrowers will be staunched.

With a dramatic drop in GDP, a dramatic reduction in lending, a dramatic increase in government borrowing costs, and the consequent decline in value-for-dollar spending ROI, the United States would find itself in a far deeper economic “ditch” than the Great Recession, with no clear path for getting out of the ditch.

Tax rates are as low as they have been since Harry Truman was president. Ronald Reagan raised the debt ceiling 17 times in 8 years, and raised taxes in order to offset the deficits created by his historic tax cuts. The cause of long-term debt and deficit reduction requires that the massive costs of default not come due.

For the first time in living memory, a Democratic president is offering major concessions on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, in exchange for relatively modest upward adjustments in the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans. A number of Senate Republicans agree this is the more responsible way to actually reduce the debt and annual budget deficits.

There is bipartisan support for the Gang of Six plan, which requires $2 trillion in new revenues. Some now argue that Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives should be ignored by Speaker John Boehner, because they continue to vow to oppose any increase in the debt ceiling, no matter the agreement reached.

Two analysts on CNN’s Your Money report today said the debt ceiling negotiations are in fact a “constitutional crisis”—a view supported by the 14th Amendment’s requirement that no public debt be called into question. It is now clear that without some serious plan to actually reduce deficits and the need for borrowing, any debt ceiling—or “cap”—will have to continue to rise, even if Congress and the White House begin to grapple over who has the authority to raise it.

What is certain is that no politician can gain anything by forcing the federal government to fail to make payments on 44% of its entire spectrum of obligations. Just one month of a 10% decline in economic output could thrust the nation almost immediately into a severe recession, causing the costs of default to fall to the shoulders of ordinary Americans, leading to a downward spiral.

This is not alarmism. It is simple arithmetic.

It is time for Congress to find common ground with the president, for both sides to make concessions, and for a serious, constructive, viable, long-term plan to emerge, in connection with a debt-ceiling increase substantial enough to last through the 2012 elections.

The nation cannot afford to face this same crisis three or six or nine months from now, with every member of the House up for re-election, along with one third of the senate and a billion-dollar-plus campaign for the White House.

Speaker John Boehner walked out of debt ceiling negotiations this morning, informing the press, and only then the White House that he was not planning to return to negotiations. Shortly after 6 pm EDT, Pres. Obama spoke to the press, and took questions, explaining that the deal offered to House Republicans was far more favorable to their position than to his own. The Speaker, however, has reportedly taken the position that the deal must be entirely based on spending cuts, with no new revenue.

At 7:15 pm, Speaker Boehner began his address to the press. His retort to Pres. Obama, and his answers to a handful of press questions, lasted roughly 12 minutes, total. He was firm, and defiant, and sounded a very different tone than he had as recently as yesterday. He led off by saying: “I want to be entirely clear: no one wants to default on the full faith and credit of the United States government.”

Boehner stated and reiterated his demand: “Spending cuts that must be greater than the increase in the debt limit, and no tax increases.” He also said ”The White House moved the goal posts.”

Boehner said there was an agreement to raise revenues—despite his and Rep. Cantor’s repeated protestations that no such deal existed and there should be no net increase in revenues—and that the president wanted $400 billion more in new revenues, which he viewed as a tax increase that would result in job losses.

Speaker Boehner has been accused of soft leadership, shifting his position toward a “grand bargain”, repeatedly, only to back out of negotiations under pressure from more extreme elements of his party, or from outside party backers. After agreeing to significant revenue increases, he, like Majority Leader Eric Cantor, shifted suddenly, more than once, to a no-new-revenue position.

He stated again: “I made it clear that we would not increase the debt limit, without cuts that exceeded that increase in the debt limit, and that there could be no new taxes.”

The first question Boehner took was “How can you say that the White House wasn’t serious about spending cuts, when they proposed more cuts than you asked for initially?” He dodged the question, explaining that the House had passed “cut, cap and balance”, which they did only this Tuesday.

Boehner continued to insist that he can work out an agreement on Capitol Hill and that he expects the president “to work with us on that agreement”. But the Washington Post is reporting that:

Late Friday, a senior GOP aide said House leaders had “no idea” how to craft a plan to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit that could win approval from the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-led House. Talks were underway between Boehner and Senate leaders, but House Republicans continued to object to a developing Senate strategy to authorize Obama to raise the debt limit through 2013 without explicit congressional approval.

When asked if he had not returned the president’s phone call, to continue negotiations on Friday, he again dodged the question and said that he gets along with the president and that “I do trust him as a negotiator”. He then began to talk about people “who don’t understand why they have to pay all the taxes they pay, and who don’t understand all the regulations that are coming out of Washington” that he says prevent them from hiring.

He then said that while it is important “to get our fiscal house in order”, it was more important to raise the debt ceiling and to do it only by cutting spending, without raising taxes. The suggestion seemed to be that while the immediate crisis involves raising the debt ceiling, Speaker Boehner may be responding to political pressure that he finds more motivational.

Economists and budget analysts have repeatedly raised the concern that a plan which does nothing to increase government revenues will take longer to pay down the debt, will force continued expanded future borrowing and would make a balanced budget nearly impossible, any time in the next ten to fifteen years.

Boehner said dealing with the White House was like negotiating with “jello”, accusing the president of changing his demand. The bone of contention is reportedly an exchange between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Mr. Boehner, which Boehner interprets as “a handshake agreement” that there would be no new revenues in excess of $800 billion. The president’s number, however, was $1.2 trillion.

“The extra $400 billion would have had to come from an increase in taxes on the very people we expect to invest in our economy and to create jobs,” said Boehner. This is widely interpreted as coded language for Speaker Boehner saying he was abandoning negotiations, in order to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

It also appears there had been no “handshake agreement” with Geithner, as Boehner himself repeatedly said there had been no agreement on specifics, throughout the week. In fact, it appears, Boehner had shaken hands with the Treasury secretary and had expressed his desire to see no more than $800 billion in new revenues. The Gang of Six plan, however, endorsed by Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, calls for more than $2 trillion in new revenues.

Boehner said there were two main priorities to be dealt with in the negotiations: “We have to increase the debt limit and we have to deal with our debt and our deficit, and the sooner we do that, the better off our country will be.” He added: ”I’m confident that Congress can act next week and not jeopardize the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared the House plan for “cut, cap and balance” finished, when the Senate voted not to approve it, Friday morning. According to the Washington Post:

Reid declared that the proposal, called Cut, Cap and Balance, was “dead.” He also said he was setting aside a separate fallback plan he had been crafting with McConnell to permit the talks between Boehner and the White House to proceed.

“The path to avert default now runs first to the House of Representatives,” he said, adding later, “The Senate will wait anxiously.”

The president clearly had to take in the entire landscape, and be deeply concerned by the apparent lack of a serious House plan that could survive any part of the legislative process aside from a vote among House Republicans. Senate Republicans have been more inclined to negotiate along the lines of the deficit commission recommendations, and have pushed for even higher revenue increases than the president was seeking.

This morning, Congressional leaders gathered with Pres. Obama in the White House Cabinet Room, to present their plans for how to get legislation through both houses of Congress and which could be signed into law ahead of the August 2 deadline. After August 2, with no deal, the United States government would be unable to pay 44% of its obligations, which bipartisan analysis suggests over one year would amount to a 10% reduction in GDP.

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has walked out of debt ceiling negotiations, with reports suggesting the Gang of Six proposal may have led to his rejection of a deal more favorable to his side than to the Democratic side. The Gang of Six proposal was based on the suggestions of a bipartisan budget-deficit commission, and included the need to raise revenues to help fund responsible deficit reduction.

Pres. Obama said Democrats “offered over $1 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending. We then offered an additional $650 billion in entitlement cuts”—mostly cost reductions and optimizations that would not affect benefits to seniors and families. He described intense ongoing debt negotiations, in which he was willing to offer the Republicans more than he asked of them, to win their support for a good faith compromise.

Pres. Obama explained that “We were seeking revenue increases that were actually less than what the Gang of Six were calling for.” The Gang of Six were calling for revenue increases that were as much as $2 trillion above the Republican negotiators’ baseline, according to the president, and Boehner was unwilling to accept a figure so high.

The president said the plan under consideration was designed to add $1.2 trillion in increased revenues, and would “reduce rates generally, while broadening the base”. This strategy was specifically designed to accommodate Republicans who have sworn they will not increase taxes.

Pres. Obama was severe in his expression of dismay: “This was an extraordinary fair deal. If it was unbalanced, it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.” He added that he was “ready to take a lot of heat from my party” and that Democratic leaders in the Senate had agreed they would make tough choices. “It is hard to understand why Speaker Boehner would walk away from this kind of deal.”

He explained that the American people want “a balanced approach”. He then explained: “If you have no revenues at all, what that means is more of a burden on seniors, more drastic cuts to education, more drastic cuts to research, a bigger burden on services that are going tomiddle class families all across the country, and it essentially asks nothing of corporate jet owners, asks nothing of oil companies, and asks nothing of people like me, who’ve done very well.”

“So, here’s what we’re gonna do,” said the president, clearly frustrated with the Repeated cutting-off of talks: “We’ve run out of time. I’ve told Speaker Boehner, I’ve told Nancy Pelosi, I’ve told Sen. Reid and Sen. McConnell, that I want them here at 11 o’clock tomorrow, and they’re going to have to tell me how they plan to avoid default.”

He said they could bring any plans they want with them, and that they would work on them together. “The only bottom line,” he explained, was that “we have to extend this debt ceiling through the next election, into 2013.”

The reason, he explained, was common sense: now that we see how difficult it is to even talk about this issue in a non-election year, the idea it could be done during a year in which the president, the entire House and one third of the Senate are facing elections, “makes no sense”.

“The American people are fed up with political posturing, and an inability for politicians to take responsible action.” The question is: What can you say yes to?

“Now, if their only answer is what they themselves have presented, which puts all of the burden on seniors and the middle class,” Pres. Obama remarked, then it would be hard to envision any serious plan emerging from the talks.

He called on members of both parties to “ignore talk radio” and resist the temptation to use the crisis to score points with their base.

Stepping up his challenge to the Republican leadership, he explicitly demanded: “Where’s the leadership? Or, how serious are you about debt and deficit reduction?”

He said he recognizes it has been tough for Speaker Boehner to bring his party to the table, quipping “I’ve been left at the altar a couple times now.”

But Obama was firm that “At a minimum, we have to increase the debt ceiling.”

He took note of the fall-back plan floated by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, which entailed granting Pres. Obama the authority to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, while allowing Congress to vote against doing so, in order to run on their opposition and attack Obama for his actions.

He said that this crisis is so jeopardizing the economic health of the nation that if Congress could do no better, then “I’m going to take the responsibility; that’s my job. If they want to give me the responsibility, I’m happy to do it.”

He added: “I’m getting letters from people telling me ‘At the end of every month, I have to skip meals,’” referring to people on social security, Americans with disabilities, veterans, who cannot make ends meet. He urged Republicans to take responsibility for their role in this crisis.

The mood was tense, and somber. The debt crisis is now deepening, dangerously, and the president was asked what he would say to Wall Street and to investors who might panic over the news that talks had collapsed.

He responded: “I am confident, simply because I cannot believe that Congress would be that irresponsible, as to not send a package that avoids a self-inflicted wound to the economy, at a time of economic hardship.”

Asked why he was offering Boehner a deal that was more generous to Republican demands than the Gang of Six proposal, Obama responded “I understand how they get themselves stirred up and constrained by the ideological lines that they draw,” and that it was more important to make sure a deal gets done than to fight an ideological battle with the Republican leadership.

Obama also explained that he was willing to do the hard work of explaining to Democrats who are skeptical, even hostile, to the grand bargain, that to achieve progressive policy goals, it is first necessary to “get our fiscal house in order”, so that progressive policy gains are sustainable.

He said “This is not a situation where somehow this was the usual food fight between Democrats and Republicans. A lot of Democrats stepped up, in ways that were not advantageous politically. We’ve shown ourselves willing to do the tough stuff on an issue that Republicans ran on.”

Obama criticized Republican intransigence: “I think a lot of the difficulty has been the seeming inability of Republicans in the House of Representatives to arrive at any sort of an agreement that compromises any of their ideological preferences.”

He sought to reassure the American people that he would not allow the nation to go into default, with all the negative impact that would have on them, explaining: “I remain confident that we will get an extension of the debt limit and we will not default. I am less confident, at this point, that people are willing to step up to the plate and deal with debt and the deficit.”

From his point of view, this was not a crisis the American people would accept ignoring: “I can’t tell you how many letters and emails I get, including from Republican voters … [saying] we sure hope you don’t just balance the budget on the backs of seniors, we sure hope that you’re not just slashing our commitment to send kids to college.”

He explained that “fairness” was “all the American people are looking for,” and urged Republicans to keep in mind “ordinary working stiffs”, people who work hard, barely get by and do so in good faith, hoping their government is on their side. “Not to be thinking of those folks is inexcusable,” he added.

“At some point, if you want to be a leader, then you’ve got to lead,” he admonished Boehner, closing his remarks.

Truth-First.com :: Today, the Speaker of the House of representatives abandoned debt ceiling negotiations, while putting the entire House on recess for the weekend. He did not return White House phone calls until after 5 pm, only to explain that he was now rejecting any plan of any kind that would raise taxes by any amount. After moving toward a credible compromise that would involve serious debt and deficit reduction, Boehner suddenly returned to the radical “starve the beast” anti-tax policy of Grover Norquist.

Shortly after 6 pm EDT, Pres. Obama addressed the press, and took questions, explaining his plan to get back to the negotiating table. Somewhat incredibly, CNN followed its analysis of the press conference by holding a phone interview with Grover Norquist, who acted as spokesperson for Speaker Boehner. Norquist explained that for seven months, it has been clear that Boehner was not willing—or empowered—to accept any tax increases.

The only “compromise”, according to Norquist, that Boehner would be able to accept—he did not clarify if this was from political pressure or due to Boehner holding views he was not making clear during the negotiations toward a “grand bargain”. Norquist all but admitted that the entire debt ceiling negotiation process is an electoral maneuver, designed to harm the Democratic party, possibly by harming the nation, to elect more Republicans to Congress and to take control of the White House.

80% of Americans want tax increases to form part of a responsible, viable, comprehensive debt and deficit-reduction plan. Only 20% of Americans agree with the radical Tea Party position that there should be zero new revenues to help fund a comprehensive plan for debt and deficit-reduction. Even among Republicans, only 26% believe a serious debt and deficit-reduction plan should be done entirely with spending cuts.

The news has anti-tax ideologues rapt with dismay and outrage, because they cannot believe 80% of people would want to see their own tax burden increased, especially during a slow economic recovery, but the figures are not Obama’s; they come from Gallup. The Gallup poll does not indicate that 80% of people want their own taxes increased, only that they want tax increases of some kind to be part of the overall deal. And there is good reason for this.

Anti-tax ideologues make constant reference to ordinary people’s standard response for a household budget crunch as a guide for how to respond to the budget deficit. This is why they are constantly shouting: “We’re broke! We have to cut spending!”. The problem with this analogy is that most people understand very well that their household budget crunch would not be a budget crunch at all, if they only had more revenues.

Most household budget crunches result from revenue hardship, not from personal irresponsibility, and people tend to stop spending when they run out of money, mainly because they have run out of money, not because they like the politics of Grover Norquist. What’s more, deep cuts to spending will put even more pressure on slim household budgets, making what crunch there is potentially far worse.

To cut spending that helps working and middle-class families to fund basic needs means to transfer that cost to their household budget, reducing the revenues available to them for other things. And the government has the ability to increase its revenues. 80% of all Americans, and fully 74% of Republicans, want tax increases to be part of the debt deal, because they recognize how the cost-burden of not including them will fall on their household budgets, now and into the future.

When massive tax reductions for the wealthy, and for multinational corporations, are passed into law with no plan to cover the resulting budget gap, the cost of those tax cuts must be paid for in one of two ways: either with resulting cost increases for everyone else, imposed directly or indirectly, or with massive, unfunded government borrowing.

It is the irresponsible “cut, cap and balance” plan, with no strategy for funding debt repayment or deficit reduction, that will result in higher debt repayment costs and a longer period of repayment and elevated government borrowing. Without new revenue to help accelerate repayment of outstanding government debt, we will have to continue funding our debt repayment with more cuts and new borrowing.

80% of Americans, and 74% of Republicans, believe we need to include at least some targeted, moderate tax increases, in any responsible debt and deficit-reduction plan, because they do not want to be subsidizing historically low tax rates for the über-wealthy and for multinational corporations earning record profits. The fact is, household budgets are not in a state to be so generous to those who feel no crunch and no need to generate new wealth by hiring.

It would be very foolish politics for Pres. Obama to sign off on a debt deal that doesn’t include a moderate increase in taxes on the wealthy and on multinational corporations. To rely solely on spending cuts will harm working Americans and middle-class families, reduce the income available for consumer spending—which constitutes 70% of the American economy—and further slow job creation.

Republicans who have earned their place in politics by occupying the conservative side of the political center need to pay attention to these polling numbers. Only a very narrow segment of even their own party’s supporters agree with the radical spending-cuts-only approach to debt and deficit-reduction. The immense majority of the American people seem to feel that in order to “trust but verify” that elected officials will lower their future debt burden, revenues would give peace of mind, and a way to move toward balance.