GOP's Clean Debt Vote Won't Fool the Dems
The House proposal for a "clean" debt vote is pure political theater. Given the way the House works, leadership almost never schedules votes without knowing the outcome in advance and, it stands to reason that the vote wouldn't be offered unless the House leadership was sure it would fail.
In the end, the debt ceiling needs to go up and, in the end, the White House and the Senate have nearly all of the high political cards and, for that matter, the facts on their side. Some sort of spending caps, along the lines that Douglas Holtz-Eakin has proposed, could make a small difference and, as a political matter, might even help Republicans in the 2012 elections. (And, given the party's rapidly deteriorating generic ballot scores, anything that helps is a good thing.)
That said, there isn't much hope that this tactic will get Republicans anywhere: parliamentary tactics, as a general rule, have very little resonance outside the beltway. Does anyone remember the "we'll talk about nothing but judges on the floor for a month" campaign that Republicans launched with the hope of breaking Democratic filibusters on judges? Sen. John McCain and Russ Feingold's threats to attach campaign finance reform to every bill and thereby gum up the Senate? House Republicans’ 2010 period of bringing up public-friendly pieces of the YouCut agenda during almost all debates? Probably not.
Although filibusters ended and campaign finance passed (little of YouCut however has been implemented), none of them happened as a result of these stunts. The bottom line is that, such parliamentary stunts have no credibility and have never really changed public policy.
If Republicans continue to substitute theatrics for substantive public policy proposals and a workable spending reduction agenda, Obama and the Democrats will end up getting the debt ceiling increase and a significant amount of political capital while Republicans will lose both the battle and the war.