Quinnipiac released their Florida poll numbers on the President and the debt ceiling bill, and it does not bode well for his 2012 chances in the swing state. His approval among Independents went from 42% last Wednesday through Sunday to 33% from Monday through Tuesday, while disapproval shot up 52% to 61%. When asked to describe how they feel about the deal, more Independents said they were “angry” (23%) than either Republicans or Democrats.

In order to contextualize the bind that this puts Obama in, it’s worth recounting what I’ve been told about how the deal went down.

With Speaker John Boehner’s plans in the House in disarray, it looks like the only legislative vehicle that still has a chance of passing before August 2nd is some form of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan. The most likely path for the Reid plan passing Congress is by getting most of its support form [...]

Yesterday, after hours of last minute whipping, Speaker John Boehner was forced to pull his debt ceiling vote from the House floor because he couldn’t get enough ultra-conservative members of his caucus to vote for it. This failure on Boehner’s part makes little sense to me. President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid both [...]

Although the debt ceiling fight isn’t over yet, it is now clear it won’t be the excuse President Obama wanted to justify quickly jamming through an austerity grand bargain. As much as Obama desperately tried to use this artificial crisis to justify cutting Social Security and Medicare in a secret deal, that opportunity slipped through [...]

Some people are worried about the potential Constitutional crisis if President Obama uses the 14th Amendment to declare the debt ceiling voting unconstitutional. The reality though is that we are already in the midst of a full blown Constitutional crisis that is will likely only get worse in the coming years. Whether or not you [...]

With less than two weeks until President Obama’s August 2nd deadline for raising the debt ceiling, there seems to be no coalescence around a single solution. If anything, the scope of ideas being discussed seems to grow wider not narrower. There is the $4 trillion grand bargain offered by President Obama. This deal was rejected [...]

Several months ago when Republicans first made it clear they were planning to hold the debt ceiling hostage many wanted President Obama to issue a veto threat. Obama could have done this while still maintaining the deficit hawk image he so desperately craves with a statement like: I would happy work on a bipartisan basis [...]

Is a vote to raise the debt ceiling the same as questioning the validity of U.S. debt? A plain reading of the Constitution certainly indicates this argument has some legs.

There are few things the leaders of our two major political parties will work together on, but keeping America fighting wars is surely one of them.

The House Republican leadership is planning to bring up for a vote a “clean bill” to raise the government’s borrowing limit. The House leadership intends for this vote to fail in order to prove the debt ceiling bill can’t pass without reaching some agreement on major cuts in spending. Of course, to “prove” this, Speaker [...]