Boehner and Cantor Declare No Debt Ceiling Increase Without Obamacare Delay and Keystone Approval

RedState.com ^ | February 11th, 2014 at 04:30 AM | Erick Erickson

[SharpRightTurn]

With the President delaying, again, parts of Obamacare, House Republican Leader Eric Cantor and Speaker John Boehner have declared they will not raise the debt ceiling unless the President does two things: (1) delay Obamacare by a year and (2) approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.

In fact, Congressman Paul Ryan is standing shoulder to shoulder with them, telling Robert Costa, “Shutting down the government puts us on the wrong side. The fight is on the debt limit”. Further, the GOP won’t even bother fighting on a continuing resolution because they feel so strongly the debt ceiling is the path forward for a fight on Obamacare and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Senator John Cornyn has even gone so far as to say the GOP might need to shut down the government to force Barack Obama’s hand in debt ceiling negotiations. There’s just one major caveat to their plan.

But first, back to the House of Representatives. As Jonathan Strong notes in his article,

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

According to Congressman Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, who was in the meeting with Eric Cantor and John Boehner, “I liked everything I heard.”

Congressman Jim Jordan, asked if he liked the GOP strategy to fight on the debt ceiling, responded to National Review with “Heck yeah!”

Oh . . . what? What’s that you say? Oh. Sorry.

That was back last year. That was all back when the GOP did not want to fight on the continuing resolution. Sorry folks, my bad. The GOP in January of 2013 and again in September of 2013 said they were going to fight Obama using the debt ceiling, not the continuing resolution.

But now they want to fight on the continuing resolution, not the debt ceiling. Yes, in 2013, the GOP said they’d fight on the debt ceiling and not the continuing resolution. Here now in 2014, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are signaling they’ll pass a clean debt ceiling and not ask for anything at all — they’ll fight on the continuing resolution.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Sigh.

How many times are they going to yank the football away from themselves before Republican voters kick them to the curb?

[gingerbread]

The only time these people will “FIGHT TOOTH AND NAIL” is when they are running for re-election. The rest of the time, all they do is count how much money they’ll get from this corporation or that corporation. If we had these kind of leaders during WW2, we’d all be speaking German or Japanese. My lord in heaven, if this is the best we can do as republican party, we may as well throw in the towel. We’ve lost the fight before it even starts.