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McCain Detonates the “Bailout” Negotiations

A late-night emergency session of the committee trying to negotiate a solution to the liquidity problem plaguing the economy came to a crashing halt tonight.  With John McCain back in DC, the House Republican caucus has rebeled against the President and McCain.  At this meeting tonight, the House Republicans sent a representative unauthorized to negotiate to the meeting (Spencer Bacchus) with a one-sheet whitepaper of “principles and general ideals” that included a Capital Gains tax-cut, increased banking deregulations and mortgage insurance that Henry Paulson has already stated to be a non-starter.

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The meeting has fallen completely apart, there is another tomorrow at 11:30am ET which will not include House Republicans, and will therefore have no impact whatsoever.

CNN and MSNBC provided breaking coverage of the detonation of the talks, FOX is rerunning footage of McCain and Bill Clinton together at the Clinton Foundation.

“What an insane day it’s been” Mike Viqueira, veteran NBC House reporter, “we are not any closer (to a deal), in fact we may be farther from it”.

McCain’s visit politicized what was already a complex situation, according to Republican commentators on CNN.  According to one of the members of the meetings: “(McCain) was the last person to speak, spoke for a couple of minutes, and didn’t say anything substantive.”

Tom Costello – NBC correspondent – “There has been very little direction from McCain today”.  A He and several commentators explained that a group of very 110-115 conservative Republicans have effectively taken control of Repubican House caucus.  On CNN, republican Strategist Ed Rollins’ explanation of what these House Republicans are thinking was: “How do we rebuild this party?”  They see a need to break with Bush, and “They don’t have much use for John McCain”.  Senator John Greg was said to be taking over negotiations for House Republicans – who, again, won’t be at tomorrow’s meeting, anyway.

So, what does all this mean?  

o  McCain went to Washington, said very little, created divisions among his own party, and perhaps precipitated the collapse of negotiations to address the liquidity in the collapsing banking system.

o  House Republicans have seen the end of the Bush/McCain reign and are looking forward to a GOP that is built from scratch.


21 comments

  1. sricki

    Had work to do and didn’t keep up with the news as well as I meant to today. Dunno about everybody else, but I’m really enjoying all this inner-party strife the Thugs are having.  

    • deregulation.  I don’t know how that’s a play to Main Street, but that is what they should be playing to.

      I think Ed Rollins has it right, they are trying to think about the GOP for 2010.

  2.  in this political climate? They must be insane. On top of that, they want to give a break to rich people with the capital gains tax cut? Did I mention that they must be insane?

  3. and they were quite clear about who was responsible for today’s deal falling apart. Then we switched over to CNN and they were also making it very clear that the House Republicans were the only thing keeping the deal from going through.

    It’s easy to see why the Republicans don’t want it to go through as negotiated. Everything the Democrats wanted was included in the proposed plan – oversight, CEO compensation, partial ownership, and a two-phased roll-out.

  4. Johannes

    seems like a hard situation for democrats to me.

    While they are under immense pressure to get some sort of deal passed to show that they have a majority to govern, many people don’t want a bailout, but they still want “something” to get done.

    So if nothing gets passed this will unfortunately, probably fall back on democrats.

    What I don’t get from my European perspective is, why parts of the blogosphere (see openleft are so adamantly opposed to any bailout) and what kind of solution they prefer instead.

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