they dealt. they said don t worry about it, we are going to whole the line on the debt ceiling. here they are dealing. every time i watch as a conservative, when i watch the republicans, try to go with obama and the democrats in congress it is like watching a little old lady trying to navigate an icy sidewalk. sean: they are competing with themselves with their own competing plans and the president doesn t have a plan. i think at this point, all right, every u.s. senator isn t a letter boehner, forget the boehner plan. the president said he would veto it. boehner taking a lot of heat from conservatives over this deal trying his level best as they passed cut, cap and balance. he did improve it today with the cbo. why should he try any more? let the president come up with a plan. at the top of the?n8 segment you asked can we afford four more years? the answer is absolutely not. the point we are at at this
direction. we are doing it against big odds because he s got the bully pulpit in the white house. the democrats control the senate. but the house republicans are doing everything they can to steer this debate and we want in the senate, we want to have an opportunity to join them many we hope we will get that chance when the winner when the boehner plan comes our way. sean: thank you senators. michelle malkin is here. we ll get her reaction to senator reid accusing speaker boehner of caving to the tea party movement and the attacks again the tea party that took place in the wall street journal and the weekly standard, coming up. my doctor told me calcium
sent a letter to boehner did boehner a favor. that s the course i would have prefered. if you poll most grassroots tea party activists who worked their hearts and souls out to put in majority in office last november, that s what they want as well. i have to struggle not to roll my eyes when i hear harry reid accusing boehner and the gop leadership of pandering to the tea party. the tea party folks wish they were being pandered to, as a result of this deal. they certainly did not, as a message of their mandate for change in november, hope that at this point in time, we would have the boehner plan and reid plan look like each other! look like pale imitations of each other. i think it was fairly mortifying after the cbo as flawed as its analysis sees have been over the last couple of years, some out yesterday and expose the shortfall in the spending cuts
2 1/2 years. all of a sudden you have to have certainty. in the letter the senate democrats just issued, they warn there will be a ratings agency downgrade if there is a short-term extension. six months is the historic average, the average in the reagan years, which obama cited as a paragon of being serious about debt in the past. the reason the ratings will drop and i think it will within a year, if not less is because one of the two major parties in every argument, every negotiation, every plan that s offered, has been looking for loopholes as a way to appear to cut spending when it doesn t. the worst example is the reid plan, which has a trillion dollars of cuts for 10-year extension of the surge in iraq and afghanistan, of phony cut from a phony spending idea, and that s, i think, the reason why nobody has confidence. it can t happen if one of the two parties is clearly unserious
from signs the tide is shifting in favor of the boehner plan from fiscal hawks. i m shifted, you don t let the perfect get in the way of the doable. there was this show of support for the boehner package. the fact is, rebs have offered the only proposal at this point that attempts to get at the root of the problem. and which actually has a chance of getting to the president s desk. that s why we ll continue to press for the legislation speaker boehner has proposed. after predicting no senate democrats will ultimately vote for the boehner bill, senator chuck schumer offered this assessment. the speaker s plan is on life support, and it s time for him to pull the plug. we need to move on to other plans that actually have a chance of passing. meanwhile senate majority leader leader harry reid s plan came up short with the budget analyst, but reid said he d trim his plan by that amount, but if