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Sen. Jon Kyl: Don’t Tie Debt Ceiling Hike To Amending The Constitution

Earlier today, Speaker John Boehner revealed that he is caving to the most radical elements of his caucus and adding a requirement to his debt ceiling plan that will allow the United States to default in six months unless Congress passes a balanced budget amendment. This proposal, which would permanently disable America’s ability to respond to economic recessions, is dead on arrival in the Senate.

Shortly before Boehner announced his new plan to place political grandstanding before preventing economic catastrophe, however, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) went on Fox News to explain why Boehner’s new plan is a terrible idea:

The problem is that my Democratic colleagues…say “no” to a balanced budget amendment, and we have a deadline approaching of Tuesday. So I’m just not sure how realistic it is to demand our Democratic colleagues that they change their position on the balanced budget amendment over the next couple of days. […]

The question is: what can be crafted that Senate Democrats will say “yes” to, because they are half of the legislative equation here, and then you have the President in the White House, also a Democrat.

Watch it:

Sen. Kyl is right. The American people elected 53 Democratic senators and they put a Democratic president in the White House. John Boehner made it absolutely clear that he does not respect Barack Obama or the Democratic Senate majority’s right to govern long before he became speaker, but the Constitution disagrees with Boehner’s belief that he can simply ignore entire branches of our government simply because they won’t indulge his tantrums.

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Next week, the United States will enter a catastrophic economic death spiral unless Republicans take Kyl’s advice and stop insisting on outlandish Tea Party fantasies as the price of saving America from disaster. John Boehner and just a handful of his fellow House Republicans have the power to end this crisis today — and they’ve chosen instead to send ransom note after ransom note to the American people.