After John Boehner reworked his bill to make the tea party happy, the House passed a bill which is now DOA and completely meaningless.
The final vote total was 218-210. Boehner got two votes more than he needed for passage.
The most interesting thing about this vote is that the entire Democratic caucus stayed together. Not a single Democrat supported the bill. Democrats who did nothing but bicker and feud while in the majority are now standing together as one against a bitterly divided GOP.
Boehner finally got the support of the House tea partiers by adding a constitutional balanced budget amendment to the bill, but this bill has no chance of moving forward. This means that the House GOP wasted critical days fighting with each other and pushed the country closer to default.
The Boehner bill doesn’t solve anything. It is a piece of ultra far right legislation that has already been rejected once by the US Senate, and they will waste no time rejecting it again. Speaker Boehner made numerous political miscalculations during his efforts to get a bill passed, but perhaps his biggest was that he did not even bother to consult House Democrats to see if he could come up with a bill that would get enough Democratic support to get around the tea party caucus.
