If it weren’t for the late-night jokes and the prime-time press conferences and the cable networks’ ticking countdown clocks to Debt Armageddon, you wouldn’t have thought the name of a post office was at stake in Congress on Thursday, let alone the full faith and credit of the United States. House Speaker John Boehner was calm and loose at his afternoon press conference, opening with a joke about his tie and slaloming around questions about the endgame of the debt standoff with the ease of an expert skier on a bunny slope. Boehner and his deputies cycled through a familiar batch of talking points – Republicans are leading when the President won’t; the Reid bill is loaded with gimmicks; encomiums to fiscal responsibility. At the end of the press conference, when a reporter asked if the House would stay in session this weekend, he offered a casual “Sure” as he strolled away.
Among the Republican freshman class, for whom Boehner’s Budget Control Act represents the first great test of their Washington tenure, signs of tension were more evident. All of a sudden, the Tea Party stalwarts are now trumpeting the necessity of compromise. “This is not about who is the most conservative. This is about common sense,” said freshman Republican Renee Elmers, who estimated the Boehner plan achieved 70% to 75% of what the GOP wanted. On the House floor, lawmakers sat thumbing their blackberries, absently scouring the electronic roll-card board above the Speaker’s rostrum. In the front row, two Georgians who have vowed to vote no – Phil Gingrey and Tom Graves – chatted quietly, one of innumerable huddles taking place throughout the Capitol as lawmakers sussed out their peers’ positions on a vote that, for many, could spur a primary challenge. Whips ambled around chatting up the rank-and-file. A line of glum-looking freshmen sat toward the back of the room, perhaps anticipating a final round of arm-twisting.
In the Speaker’s Lobby, the ornate chamber off the House floor, reporters swarmed the freshmen, volleying a broad array of hypothetical questions at them and then furtively asking each other whom they were speaking with after the lawmaker proceeded to the next inquisition. When Majority Leader Eric Cantor stepped off the floor, he was immediately surrounded by a press pack hoping for a morsel of candor, only to hear him recite the same talking points he had given at a press conference an hour before. Some lawmakers appeared to be pantomiming phone conversations as they ran through the press gauntlet on the way to the balcony for a cigarette.
After months of reheated arguments, back-channel negotiations, bomb-throwing press conferences and way too many commissions, the floor debate on the Boehner bill was allotted two hours. It opened to a sparsely filled chamber, with an argument about whether or not it represented a bipartisan compromise. Democrats talked about Medicare and Medicare and accused the GOP of protecting the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. Republicans talked about putting the nation on the path back to fiscal sanity and assailed Democrats for lacking a plan. With an unknown fiscal calamity looming and a divided government still locked in an apparent stalemate, some managed to sift through the gloom and find the positives. “The culture of this city is changing,” said New York Republican Tom Reed.
In some ways that’s true. Buoyed by Barack Obama’s tacit agreement, Republicans have won the argument that austerity, rather than robust government intervention, is the proper course for today’s shaky economy. In the Boehner plan and the Reid alternative, the GOP have on the table two bills that satisfy the strict conditions they placed on a debt-limit increase that for decades has been a formality. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll vote for either. While passage of the Boehner bill seemed likely at the 11th hour, the measure is doomed, set to die within hours in the Senate, where 51 Democrats and two independents have already served Republicans notice that they will defeat it. The vote is another dramatic set piece that allows one side to claim symbolic victory and fresh talking points, but leaves the nation no closer to a solution. Which makes it an apt metaphor for this entire Congress.