How bad is this debt ceiling thing? Bad enough that Ezra Klein traces President Obama's fumbling of the negotiations back to the cat food commission. Bad enough that House Republicans cannot reach agreement even among their own caucus. Bad enough that Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne told us last night:
I have rarely been this depressed, I think, and I've been here awhile, about the way Washington is working.This is a totally politician-induced crisis. I mean, we didn't have enough crises, so we had to induce one, create one, out of whole cloth.And the problem is, you cannot see how to get 218 votes in the House of Representatives for anything because of this rejectionist caucus, otherwise known as the Tea Party caucus, and both Speaker Boehner and the majority leader, Eric Cantor, are kind of playing to them. They don't want to sort of annoy them.At some point, I think they're just going to have to say, we will not let the country get wrecked by this.