The Incredible Shrinking Speaker

John Boehner has decided to drop any attempt at a grand bargain with Obama, because he could get no one, not even the Majority Whip or Majority Leader, his closest lieutenants in the house, to agree to close a few tax loopholes in order to have Obama cut the Democrats throats with Social Security and Medicare cuts:

House Speaker John A. Boehner abandoned efforts Saturday night to cut a far-reaching debt-reduction deal, telling President Obama that a more modest package offers the only politically realistic path to avoiding a default on the mounting national debt.

On the eve of a critical White House summit on the debt issue, Boehner (R-Ohio) told Obama that their plan to “go big,” in the speaker’s words, and forge a compromise that would save more than $4 trillion over the next decade, was crumbling under Obama’s insistence on significant new tax revenue.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes,” Boehner said in a statement released less than 24 hours before the White House meeting was scheduled to begin. “I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”

Boehner’s decision leaves negotiators reexamining a less-ambitious framework — aimed at saving roughly $2.4 trillion over the next decade — that had been under discussion between Vice President Biden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. But that framework is hardly complete; the group broke up last month when Republicans walked out over the tax issue.

The sweeping deal Obama and Boehner had been discussing would have required both parties to take a bold leap into the political abyss. Democrats were demanding more than $800 billion in new tax revenue, causing heartburn among the hard-line fiscal conservatives who dominate the House Republican caucus. Republicans, meanwhile, were demanding sharp cuts to Medicare and Social Security, popular safety net programs that congressional Democrats have vowed to protect.

There is only one way that I can see this debt limit thing, which is an artifact of what Obama wanted in December, turning out well, and that is by generating an export led recovery, and no small amount of inflation, if the dollar drops by 30+%.

That being said, while there House Speakers who have been profoundly weak, Tom Foley comes to mind, as does Tip O'Neill from 1981-83, I have never seen such a profoundly impotent speaker as Boehner. 

It's stunning.