US Meltdown Day -5, House Fiddles, Nobody Singing

It surprises nobody that the House can't agree on much of anything, they've descended into a rabble of  finger pointing. After a week of supposed "progress" in talks, the House came up empty.

“The problem here is that we don’t have a functioning majority,” said Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California. “After three weeks of this, they’re still not figuring it out. I don’t know what it takes.”

“Perhaps he sees this as the best opportunity for him to win the House in 2014,” said Rep. John Fleming, R-La. “It’s very clear to us he does not now, and never had, any intentions of negotiating.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not supposed to be this way,” President Barack Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. “Manufacturing crises to extract massive concessions isn’t how our democracy works, and we have to stop it. Politics is a battle of ideas, but you advance those ideas through elections and legislation — not extortion.”

“The Senate needs to hold tough,” Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said Boehner told House Republicans who met in a Capitol basement meeting room for an update on negotiations. “The president now isn’t negotiating with us.”

 CNN reports:

There is growing concern being expressed in private meetings that the House GOP plan extending the debt ceiling for six weeks would come back to haunt the party, because it would expire close to the holidays, hurting retailers.

There also are worries about the impact of the partial shutdown dragging on, especially with polls showing the Republican Party getting the brunt of the blame.