It's the Republican way. Whenever they fail, they always blame it on the other side. So it is with Speaker (maybe Former Speaker?) John Boehner, who is now refusing to engage in any one-on-one negotiations with President Obama ever again, no way, no how, he's done forever.

Via The Hill:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is signaling that at least one thing will change about his leadership during the 113th Congress: he’s telling Republicans he is done with private, one-on-one negotiations with President Obama.

During both 2011 and 2012, the Speaker spent weeks shuttling between the Capitol and the White House for meetings with the president in the hopes of striking a grand bargain on the deficit.

Those efforts ended in failure, leaving Boehner feeling burned by Obama and, at times, isolated within his conference.

In closed-door meetings since leaving the “fiscal cliff” talks two weeks ago, lawmakers and aides say the Speaker has indicated he is abandoning that approach for good and will return fully to the normal legislative process in 2013 — seeking to pass bills through the House that can then be adopted, amended or reconciled by the Senate.

"He is recommitting himself and the House to what we've done, which is working through regular order and letting the House work its will,” an aide to the Speaker told The Hill.

Personally, I think this is a good thing, but it is funny that Boehner announces it like somehow President Obama made him take that crappy Plan B bill to the floor, or that President Obama somehow twisted his arm into putting the Senate compromise bill out for a clean vote.

I guess President Obama also forced him to walk away from the table when they were just short of a deal. Twice.

In some ways, this bodes well for the debt ceiling vote. If Boehner stays true to his promise, he'll put a clean bill out and let the House debate and vote on it, with no negotiating, which is what the President has said needs to happen.

Or maybe Eric Cantor will oust him. Either way, he looks like the petulant fool that he is.

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Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona today, discussing the ongoing fiscal bluff negotiations between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner:

I think the Speaker is at a profound disadvantage in the negotiations as it is ... simply because he's got a recalcitrant Senate and a president that simply is out of touch with reality.

Hm. And which reality is that? Maybe the reality on Planet Wingnut, where up is down, trickle-down succeeds, tax cuts create jobs, and the Rhythm Method works. And the public secretly supported Republicans in the last election.

Over here in our own little Planet Earth, the public resoundingly approves of Obama's approach to the negotiations -- and even a majority of Republicans agree that Obama has a mandate to take away those huge tax breaks Bush handed the wealthy. The crushing reality here is that Boehner and Co. are negotiating with their asses in their hands.

Of course, the current majority of members of the House happen to reside on Planet Wingnut. So that's a problem.

Sen. Tom Coburn offers us this Moment of Irony: He frets that negotiations between BP and the White House may not have been fair because, well, BP was in a weaker PR position.

KING: Rush right or is the Republican leadership in the House right?

COBURN: Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s the cynicism of our politics today. Nobody in either party wants to be vulnerable on any issue and where’s the real leadership? You know what we lack is where is the clarity of purpose. Nobody disagrees that BP is going to be held accountable. The question is how and when and that’s a small matter right now in terms of the problem that we have.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: Do you have any problem with the White House negotiating this deal?

COBURN: Well I’m not sure it’s fair negotiations because you’re dealing with one very strong party and one very weak party in terms of public relations. But you know basically holding them accountable is where we want to be and this is one way of doing it.

See? This isn't about fairness, not really. It's about the appearance of fairness from a public relations standpoint. The whole "shakedown" meme begun by Joe Barton last week and continued through the weekend is nothing more than an effort to turn the victimizer into the victimized. Since there's absolutely no foundation for such a flip, there's only how things look.

(h/t Talking Points Memo)

This is a very interesting turn of events.

Bob Corker was looking for Chris Dodd. When the Tennessee Republican got him on the phone, he started to get the feeling that financial regulatory reform talks were collapsing after weeks of negotiations.

"You've been a great partner," Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told Corker, who had been taking a lead role in the talks.

"My little antennae went up," said Corker in response to Dodd's use of the past tense to describe their partnership. On Wednesday afternoon, the pair met privately and Dodd broke the news: He was moving forward with his party on reform, cutting short negotiations with Corker that have been dragging on for roughly a month.

Dodd (D-Conn.) announced on Thursday morning that he will unveil a bill on Monday without GOP support and he intends to bring it to a vote the following week.

And I believe the pressure we've been putting on Dodd not to fold the CFPA into the FED is one of the major reasons he broke off with Corker.

Corker said that the second pressure point for Dodd was that "members on the left were getting nervous" about where the Consumer Financial Protection Agency would be located. Progressive Democrats have been particularly vocal in their opposition to placing the CFPA inside the Federal Reserve and Dodd was beginning to wonder if he had enough Democratic votes, he said.

The same Democrats are also concerned that the CFPA will lack sufficient independence and authority. But, said Corker, Dodd had accepted a GOP proposal to create a board of regulators with veto power over any rules passed by the CFPA. The panel would include the SEC, FDIC, Fed, Treasury and CFTC.

It looks like Queen Snowe will step in and help in the end.

Democrats, however, do not need Corker to pass the bill. Earlier this week, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) told HuffPost that once the bill was out of committee she looked forward to playing a central role in negotiations. She already joined Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in sending a letter to Dodd, calling for tough regulation of derivatives. Dodd's decision to move forward without Republican support in the committee opens the door for Snowe, who's more moderate than Corker and Shelby, to step in.

Corker will probably go on all the shows and do a bipartisan whine for the Villagers to embrace. You know republicans are only watering down the bill as much as possible.

Republicans wanted banking regulators to take the lead in enforcing consumer rules, but Democrats argued that such a system would water down consumer protections

.

Americans unequivocally want strong Wall Street regulations.

An overwhelming majority of Americans wants Wall Street subjected to tougher regulation in the aftermath of the bank bailout and the bonus scandals that have rocked the U.S. financial sector, according to a Harris poll released on Thursday.The findings suggest that 82 percent of Americans want the government to clamp down more strongly on Wall Street excesses, with a particular emphasis on bonus schemes that have rewarded employees at loss-making companies such as American International Group.

John Harwood said on CNBC that Democrats want to get this done sooner than later and that's why they moved in this direction.

Richard Trumka's not making an idle threat here. Union supporters don't have much to cheer about in this healthcare bill, and I don't think he's exaggerating the impact on the midterm elections. It's just that, for whatever reason, Obama's a lot more interested in the welfare of bankers than he is in workers:

President Obama sought on Monday evening to assuage organized labor's misgivings about the health-care overhaul, even as several key union leaders warned that the bill's final outlines could severely dampen their enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket in this year's elections.

Obama invited 10 labor leaders to the White House to discuss the negotiations aimed at reconciling the Senate and House bills, which are not heading in organized labor's direction in the three areas that it had identified as priorities. The final bill will not include the House's government-run insurance plan, or "public option"; it will probably include the Senate's new tax on high-cost health plans that could affect many union members; and its penalties for employers who do not provide insurance coverage will probably be closer to the more lenient terms in the Senate bill.

Three hours earlier, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a hard-edged speech at the National Press Club that discontent with the final bill, when combined with a general perception that Obama and Congress have been insufficiently populist in responding to the recession and financial crisis, could demoralize his members. The risk, he said, was a replay of the Democratic blowout in the 1994 elections, when, after the passage of NAFTA and other disappointments to unions, "there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the difference between the two parties."

"Now, more than ever, we need the boldness and the clarity we saw in our president during the campaign in 2008," he said.

Trumka stopped short of his September threat that the AFL-CIO might not support the final bill -- after all, he said, labor has been seeking health-care reform for decades. But individual members could sit on their hands. "A bad bill could have that kind of effect," he told reporters. "People could stay home. It could suppress votes."

Those were definitely words that we in the wilderness wanted to hear, after the secrecy and closed doors of the Bush administration. To be fair, I'm not sure how much control even the President has over how much transparency Congress is willing to allow, but that doesn't mean we're not going to remind him of his campaign promises:

My colleagues Igor Volsky and Matt Yglesias have eloquently argued on ThinkProgress that C-Span’s cameras should not be allowed to film the final negotiations between the House and Senate as they hammer out health care legislation that President Obama will soon sign into law. While I respect their arguments, I take a very different view. I have long believed that openness and transparency are essential bedrock measures for ensuring public accountability of our government. Letting C-Span cameras into health care conference meetings will keep negotiators honest, give the public an opportunity for input, and allow the process to be more collaborative.[..]

Critics have argued that the presence of cameras is likely to produce political posturing and grandstanding by politicians. And indeed, with the cameras rolling, Republicans have said health care reform is a bigger threat than terrorism, claimed that seniors would be told to “drop dead,” and even called the President a liar. But I’m glad cameras were there to capture those demeaning comments. They have helped all Americans gain a better understanding of the unwillingness of some on the right to engage in a rational debate.

The presence of cameras has also produced some beneficial outcomes. For instance, C-Span cameras exposed House GOP efforts to silence members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus when they tried to speak on the floor. The cameras also shamed Senate Republicans when they tried to filibuster the debate by forcing the reading of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer amendment.

Democrats have nothing to fear from an open debate. They are working to expand affordable coverage to 31 million uninsured Americans, lowering premiums, ending the insurance industry’s denial of pre-existing conditions, and ensuring women will no longer be charged much more for the same coverage as men. When the House and Senate meet in the coming weeks to discuss this historic legislation, I would humbly urge them to let the cameras roll. We can handle the truth.

TPM reports that Reid is close to pulling off senatorial support for the public option - and the White House wants Olympia Snowe's trigger option instead.

In other words, the White House wants the plan that won't work, so they can claim it's a bipartisan plan. Or is it that the administration wants a plan that won't really work, and they're using bipartisanship as a cover? Just asking the obvious question, here:

Multiple sources tell TPMDC that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is very close to rounding up 60 members in support of a public option with an opt out clause, and are continuing to push skeptical members. But they also say that the White House is pushing back against the idea, in a bid to retain the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

"They're skeptical of opt out and are generally deferential to the Snowe strategy that involves the trigger," said one source close to negotiations between the Senate and the White House. "They're certainly not calming moderate's concerns on opt-out."

This new development, which casts the White House as an opponent of all but the most watered down form of public option, is likely to yield backlash from progressives, especially those in the House who have been pushing for a more maximal version of reform.

It also suggests for perhaps the first time that the White House's supposed hands off approach that ostensibly allowed the two chambers in Congress to craft their own bill has been discarded.

High level White House officials have floated the trigger idea a number of times, and it seems they continue to do so, even at this, crucial stage of the health care reform process, when their involvement is greatest. That has senators who support the public option concerned.

UPDATE: Big Tent Democrat has another take. So does Nate Silver.

So Senate Democrats on the Finance Committee offered an amendment that would enable the federal government to bargain for lower drug prices for their bulk purchasing, a direct assault on the White House/Big Pharma deal from a few months back. Basically it would shift poor seniors back onto Medicaid for their drug purchasing, where the government can negotiate discounts. This would save the government over $80 billion dollars.

And Tom Carper of Delaware defended the secret deal in the most amazing of ways:

I was not involved in negotiations with PhRMA but I believe that the administration was, obviously PhRMA was, and I presume this committee was involved in some way in those negotiations.

And what PhRMA agreed to do through those negotiations is to pay about

80 billion dollars over 10 years to help fill up half the donut hole. That's my understanding. And they are prepared to go forward and to honor that commitment. As I understand it, the commitment from our colleague Senator Nelson would basically double what was negotiated with PhRMA.

And whether you like PhRMA or not -- remember I talked earlier today in our opening statements, I talked about four core values, and one of those is the golden rule, treat other people the way I want to be treated?

I'll tell you -- if someone negotiated a deal with me and I agreed to put up say, 80 dollars or 80 million dollars or 80 billion dollars and then you came back and said to me a couple of weeks later -- no no, I know you agreed to do 80 billion and I know you were willing to help support through an advertising campaign this particular -- not even this particular bill, just the idea of generic health care reform? No, we're going to double -- we're going to double what you agreed in those negotiations to do. That's not the way -- that's not what I consider treating people the way I'd want to be treated.

That just doesn't seem right to me.

This is incredible. The deal is transparently one to protect drug industry profits. There's just no doubt about this. Carper is saying that it's more important to get a few generic ads in support of health care reform than to save the US taxpayers $80 billion dollars. Backroom deals must be honored even if they hurt people. That's the "golden rule" in Washington.

Did Carper not know that cameras were rolling when he said this?

This is encouraging, because untying the public option to Medicare virtually guaranteed no significant cost savings:

Speaker Pelosi is nixing a deal she cut with centrists to advance health reform, said a source familiar with negotiations.

Pelosi’s decision to abandon the agreement that was made with a group of Blue Dogs to get the bill out of committee would steer the healthcare legislation back to the left as she prepares for a floor vote.

Pelosi is planning to include a government-run public option in the House version of the healthcare bill. She wants to model it on Medicare, with providers getting reimbursed on a scale pegged to Medicare rates.

"The speaker is full-steam-ahead," said a senior Democratic aide.

Blue Dog Democrats, many of whom represent rural districts where Medicare reimbursement rates are low, vehemently oppose tying the public option to Medicare.

Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.) and a group of fellow Blue Dogs had negotiated a deal with Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) in July that would remove the link to Medicare. Under that plan, officials with the government-run plan would negotiate individually with providers.

That move, which drew howls of protest from liberal members, prevented the bill from getting stuck in committee. But Ross returned from the August break saying he couldn't support a public option under any circumstances, essentially withdrawing his support for the deal.

Pelosi is now effectively withdrawing her support. In leadership meetings last week, she said the public option in the House bill should be linked to Medicare.

Other Blue Dogs involved in the deal have said they realized the public option they negotiated was likely to change before it went to the floor.

Pelosi has also told her fellow leaders she still wants an income surtax on the wealthy, rather than a tax on "Cadillac" health plans, as a means to help pay the $1 trillion cost of the bill. The rest is to be made up with savings in Medicare by eliminating wasteful spending.

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