One way you can tell which party is running the House is whether things happen on time. If they do, it's the Republicans in charge. And so it came to pass that the budget vote actually occurred around 4 this afternoon. In a Democratic era you can be sure it would have been 11 tonight.
The vote was mildly surprisingly to me in that only 57 Republicans opposed, while 179 supported. That was few enough, obviously, that John Boehner had to rely on Democratic votes for the thing to go through. Some are trying to spin this as a bit of an embarrassment for Boehner, but there was never any serious doubt that around half the Democrats would indeed vote for it, so he always had some wiggle room.
The Democratic tally was 81 for, 108 against. The liberals and the hard-shell tea partiers were against, obviously for different reasons, and the moderate Democrats and the merely conservative Republicans were for it.
We could be entering a period, after a decade of very stringent GOP unity, of a pretty seriously splintered GOP caucus. Assume the debt ceiling vote passes but under similar circumstances. That'll be strike two. It'd be nice if these two factions were moderates and conservatives, you know, in the way that Democrats have moderates and liberals, rather than conservatives and ultras. On the other hand ultras can be amusing to watch. Too bad there are no witches.
