Word: blunting
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More taboo than sex, more divisive than baseball, politics—the art of making the possible impossible—has given us the country we have, and the country we don’t. On alternate Fridays, Elise X. Liu ‘11 takes a blunt and unabashedly partisan look at the power behind the pettiness, and the facts behind the news...
...Part of the problem is that both Boehner and Representative Roy Blunt, the No. 2 House Republican, have long ties to the Bush Administration. Their initial inclination to support Paulson was greeted by a rebellion on the right. And the fact that both leaders eventually supported the compromise bill that almost two-thirds of their members opposed was viewed as a major betrayal of the movement by many conservative activists. "The incompetence of Boehner and Blunt and their team is beyond belief," says Richard Viguerie, head of ConservativeHQ.com. "For the good of their party and the good of their country...
...parties have different accounts of what led up to the vote. Two Republican recollections of the same conversation had Blunt informing Hoyer that they were short - Blunt counted 60-some GOP votes and was hopeful they could get as many as 75 - and that Democrats would have to make up the rest. Four Democratic sources dispute this version, insisting that they were always promised between 80-90 GOP votes - still short of the 100 votes that would make up a majority of House Republicans, but enough to qualify as a bipartisan victory...
...Monday afternoon. By 1:51, 227 members had voted against it - nine votes more than the 218 majority. By 2:02 p.m., Hoyer and Representative Rahm Emanuel, the No. 4 House Democrat, were in animated discussions on the Republican side of the chamber with Boehner and Blunt. Hoyer "was running around in there saying, 'The market is falling! The market is falling!' " said Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican. Faced with a major GOP shortfall, Democrats refused to force 12 of their members to change their votes for a bill that they had just spent the past week renegotiating...
...with the Jewish New Year celebration starting Monday night, nothing can be done until Wednesday evening at the earliest, and the House is not expected to be back in session until Thursday at noon. Democrats pledged to keep working on a bipartisan basis, though privately many questioned Boehner and Blunt's ability to deliver their fellow party members...