has been the most public and active stage of the negotiations. bluffing by definition must be public and must be full of false activity. the president, by far the best bluffer of all the major players, got the bluffing going in earnest with his press conference on july 11th, by which time he had masterfully maneuvered the republicans into a stalemate of the negotiations, which then allowed the president to pretend that he was in favor of more deficit reduction than republican house speaker john boehner. since boehnor had given up on reaching the so-called grand bargain on a $4 trillion deficit reduction çpackage, a package that in truth would have been full of budget cuts that would be politically, not to mention morally, too much for the president to actually accept and
plan. that was republican congressman jim jordan yesterday, but today, late in the day, starting to seem like speaker boehnor s fortunes were changing. his debt ceiling proposal was reevaluated by the congressional budget office and he pitched that plan to republicans in the house with some very persuasive language, as he explained on right wing radio this morning. is it true that you told some of the republican members this morning that you need to get your a-word in line behind this debt ceiling bill? i sure çdid. listen, this is time to do what is doable. joining us now from washington, for the very latest is john stanton, reporter for roll call newspaper, nice to have you, john. good to be here. so, i find myself in the strange position of actually sort of rooting for john boehner here, for him to do well, for him to have a better day today than he had yesterday. do you think it s fair to say
that they don t have the votes. sometimes, when things get really tense, congressional leaders actually have to bring a defeated in order to prove to their own party that what they want is impossible. you are now watching john boehner trying to prove to the tea party what is impossible. if his bill comes to a vote in the house and passes, harry reid has promised to demonstrate that it is impossible to pass the senate. speaker boehnor s plan is not a compromise. it was written for the tea party, not the american people. democrats will not vote for it, democrats will not vote for it, democrats will not vote for it, democrats will not vote for it. it s dead on arrival in the senate, if they get it out of the house. the tea party s in the driver s seat for the house republicans
leadership has them still trapped in posturing for the tea party. boehnor knows that his latest proposal, which cbo has exposed as not saving as much money as boehnor claimed, has no chance of becoming law. but the tea party doesn t know that. so boehnor has to appear to be fighting for it or something like it, fighting until the very end. and so boehnor pretends to fight for it as h told the house republican caucus today. get your ass in line, this is the bill. i can t do this job unless you re behind me. but tea party approval is still hard to come by for an old republican establishment guy like boehnor. i will not vote for this bill, because i don t think we should be raising the debt ceiling at all. we need to be doing what a business does when it becomes
overextended. federal government is broke. to me, we can do better, it s just not good enough, and i think we can do better. will you vote for it? no, i can t, martin. i will not vote to increase the debt ceiling. it goes completely contrary to common sense. former maverick, john mccain, is not exactly maverick-y enough to risk not raising the debt ceiling, so he has rushed to mcconnell and boehnor s side to try to talk sense to the tea party. some members are believing that we can pass a balanced budget amendment, the constitution, in this body, with its present representation, and that is foolish. that is worse than foolish. that is deceiving many of our constituents by telling them that just because the majority leader tabled the balanced budget amendment legislation, that somehow through amending