John Boehner's fiscal cliff 'Plan B' failure: What now?

That had to hurt. House Speaker John Boehner was trying to show some muscle in his negotiations with President Obama on a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, which threatens to inflict financial pain on virtually every American household in the new year. Then late Thursday, despite a frantic attempt to twist the arms of his fellow Republicans, Boehner had to cancel a vote on his proposal, known as Plan B, to extend Bush-era tax breaks to everyone making less than $1 million a year, because he couldn't get enough votes from his own party to pass it.

It was all for show — Plan B wouldn't have passed the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Obama, who wants to let taxes go up for households making more than $400,000, had vowed to veto it, anyway. But instead of showing Boehner's strength, say Jake Sherman, Carrie Budoff Brown, and John Bresnahan at Politico, the move "morphed into an exercise in exposing the limits of his power in the House."

"The White House may chortle that the GOP is in disarray, and it is," says The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, "but this failure to govern also owes much to President Obama's failure to negotiate with any degree of seriousness." Boehner first offered to raise $800 billion in new revenue through tax reform as part of a balanced deficit-reduction plan. Obama said no. Then Boehner "finally cracked on raising rates," and offered to let taxes rise for those making more than $1 million. Obama still said no — and he refused to offer specific entitlement reform, while insisting that Republicans let the debt limit be lifted permanently. Plan B was Boehner's "last resort" to push for compromise.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The path to a deal is "now far less clear," says John Avlon at The Daily Beast. So we all get to go into the holiday facing the increased likelihood that $600 billion in automatic tax hikes and spending cuts will kick in, possibly dragging the economy into another recession. "Merry Cliffmas." At least now the entire nation can see that it's the anti-tax conservatives who are refusing to negotiate.

Boehner has a conservative revolt on his hands, says Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. A significant number of his fellow Republicans in the House "clearly don't trust his strategic instincts, they don't feel personally bound to support him, they clearly disagree with his belief that tax rates must rise as part of a deal, and they, along with many other Republicans, must be humiliated after the shenanigans on the House floor" on Thursday. When Republicans vote on who'll be the Speaker of the House in the new Congress on Jan. 3, Boehner might lose his job. Between now and then, though, he can still play a role in sparing the nation from a dive off the cliff.