July 30, 2011 06:10 AM UTC

Boehner Plan Squeaks Through House With Colorado Republican Support

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• by: Colorado Pols

Washington Post:

The House on Friday narrowly approved Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) debt-ceiling framework, one day after leaders postponed the vote and revamped the measure to secure support from conservatives and four days before the deadline for Congress to raise the federal borrowing limit or else send the country into default.

The new Boehner debt plan – which would allow for a short-term increase in the country’s $14.3 trillion borrowing limit but would make a second increase dependent on Congress sending to the states a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution – passed the House shortly before 6:30 p.m. on party-line vote, 218 to 210.

It’s unlikely to progress far in the Senate, where all 53 Senate Democrats oppose the measure. But Friday’s vote paves the way for leaders to assemble a bipartisan compromise that will need to pass both chambers and be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday if the country is to avoid default…

The list of 22 Republican members of Congress who voted no doesn’t contain any Colorado names, which means that any squeamishness on the part of Rep. Cory Gardner as may have been the case yesterday got cleared up by the “sweetening” of this bill, including the balanced budget amendment debate it would mandate, by John Boehner to attract additional conservative support. It has reportedly already been killed in the Senate, but the passage of any bill at this point in the “Tea Party”-dominated House is a significant victory for Boehner; albeit over his own right flank. The real purpose of this, with its fate in the Senate never in question, is to see what parts of it they can force into something the Senate can still pass.

We’d end with “tick tick tick” or something, but it seems kind of gratuitous at this point.