Jake Sherman has the latest on how incompetent the House is proving—still!—at passing a government funding compromise. The lower chamber’s workweek wraps up today, because said compromise has been punted to next week for lack of support.
A clearly frustrated Boehner seemed to realize that he leads a conference where no plan is quite good enough. There are frequently about 30 Republicans who oppose leadership’s carefully crafted plans — just enough to mess things up. A reporter asked him whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, “No.”
“Do you have an idea?” he asked the reporters. “They’ll just shoot it down anyway.”
Mitch McConnell, always able to do more with less than Boehner, is proposing the delay-Obamacare amendment that savvy conservatives have viewed as the best way of undermining the law.
Apropos of this: The Tea Party is increasingly angry with its Republican representation in Congress.
The Syria expert cited by Kerry and McCain, previously in hot water for not disclosing her work with a rebel group, has been fired after inflating her resume—from having an unfinished Ph.D. to being a doctor already.
And Leon Hadar explains why “This Town” loves a good war now and then.
The good news is that even if you actually messed things up by leading us into a disastrous war in Iraq, or wrote columns predicting that said war would be a great success, your friends in this town have a tendency to forgive and forget. Don’t worry. You’ll still receive those big consulting contracts, be invited to appear as an analyst on cable news shows, or get to write columns for our leading newspapers. Someone else will pay for the mistakes you made in Iraq, and those you’re trying to make in Syria.
