"As it happens, Reid and McConnell came very close to inking a deal Monday night, but then McConnell suspended their negotiations on Tuesday to give Boehner a chance at passing a bill, which promptly collapsed under the weight of his own ineptitude and your basic garden-variety House Republican lunacy, at which point Reid and McConnell resumed their negotiation over a deal that will soon pass the Senate and force Boehner's hand. Which is to say, I missed the all-important "let's briefly pause so Boehner can flail helplessly while the entire world looks on in horror before we officially end this thing" step in the process.
In retrospect, I'm not sure how I overlooked it. That final pathetic lurch is a tradition Boehner inaugurated during the fiscal cliff negotiation last December (recall "Plan B," which Boehner also chose to euthanize before it came to a vote in the House). There was every reason to believe he'd observe that same sacrament this time around.
But don't mistake it for anything other than what it was: the final spasm of a still-fresh corpse, the corpse being the GOP's legitimacy as a political entity, to say nothing of its negotiating position in this particular conflict. If Boehner had actually had the votes to pass a bill that reopened the government and raised the debt ceiling while enacting a few modest Republican priorities—which is to say, a bill that would have been taken seriously inside Washington and put Democrats in something of a bind—he would have done it days ago, in time to give himself some actual leverage. As Boehner told his caucus, you'd "rather throw a grenade than catch a grenade." But he didn't have the votes. With his conservative members still lingering in a different dimension, and their peasant army of activists and moneymen declaring anything short of death to Obamacare a capitulation, it was utterly hopeless. Boehner, as is his wont, simply unpinned a grenade he knew he didn't have the arm-strength to throw."
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