From Thursday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On Speaker Boehner being short a few votes for his debt ceiling plan:
If they can’t get the last two votes, they can appeal to five no votes and say, ‘Look, you can honorably abstain. You wouldn’t be supporting something that you say that you can’t. But the future of the party and the fate of this debt issue is in your hands, because if we don’t succeed, we lose all our leverage, and we will end up worse off.’
On an S&P conference call suggesting that any deficit reduction deal short of $4 trillion may not be significant enough to avoid a downgrade of U.S. credit:
What is really important here is that it completely undermines the Obama argument against the Boehner bill. Its argument is: It’s [the debt ceiling extension] got to be a year and a half because if it’s shorter, that will cause the rating agencies to lower our rating because of uncertainty.
What you’re hearing here is if the ratings are lowered because of what’s going on here, it’s not because of the shortness of the extension. It’ll be because of the size [of the debt reduction], because the size is what tells you about the seriousness. And the seriousness that has been demonstrated by the Democrats here has been zero. It’s resisted all entitlement reform, all real reform, and in the Reid plan it seeks all kinds of loopholes and gimmicks to avoid real debt reductions.
So if Obama says, ‘I can’t support a six-month extension because it will lower our rating,’ what we’re hearing here is the opposite. It’s the size and the seriousness that matters.