Boehner Bill Passes, 218-188

Speaker John Boehner's budget bill passed the House by a 218-188 vote. There were 22 Republicans who voted against it.Not a single Democrat voted for the measure.

It's fairly watered down, calling for the cutting og $917 billion in government spending over ten years and would require the passage of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution before raising the debt ceiling for a second time in February, 2012. The Boehner Bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed to kill it.

Reid will likely advance his own bill now in the Senate, which is frankly ridiculous. The two sides are only $8 billion apart once you ignore Reid’s phony war “savings.”

And that's not the worst of it. According to the House version, HR 2693, it raises the debt ceiling to from $14.3 trillion $16.99 Trillion, has a slew of new taxes in it - oh, pardon me, 'revenue increases' - and defers almost everything to another debt committee further on down the road. In other words, just a sham raise taxes and kick the can down the road to get Obama and the Democrats through the 2012 elections.

Amazingly, there may be some Republicans thinking about voting for it:

Right now, Democrats are looking to about 11 gettable GOP votes: Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Bob Corker (R-TN), Mark Kirk (R-IL), Scott Brown (R-MA), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Tom Coburn (R-OK). The last three were the Republican members of the Gang of Six deficit reduction group.

Remember this is George Soros' bought and paid for shills at Talking Points Memo, so some of these senators may not be 'gettable'. But there's no doubt some of them are.

The sad thing here is that Boehner's plan is fairly watered down and even that might be too strong for the Democrat/cooperative Republican Senators from the Northeast. If they vote with Reid, it's a major diss to Speaker Boehner after the hoops he jumped through to get even this weak measure passed.

My sources tell me that the Senate will likely kill Boehner's bill out of hand first and then Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will huddle together for a 'compromise bill' to be voted on over the weekend. Shudder.

Rep. Jeff Flake, by the way, has an interesting idea to get the Balanced Budget Amendment on the agenda even if Reid blocks it

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