Via Climate Progress: Obama: House GOP Would Rather Destroy the U.S. Economy Than “Ask Anything of Corporate Jet Owners, Oil & Gas Companies” and the Rich

Last night, House Speaker John Boehner bailed on negotiations with President Obama on a debt ceiling deal.  In a hastily-arranged news conference, Obama angrily explained the problem:

“If you do not have any revenues, if you have no revenues at all, what that means is more of a burden on seniors, more drastic cuts to education, more drastic cuts to research, bigger cuts to services for the middle class. It doesn’t ask anything of corporate jet owners, oil and gas companies, and people like me, who’ve done very well.” Republicans, he said, were demanding “a package that would effectively require massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and domestic spending, while not asking anything from the wealthiest of this country.”
“If that’s their only answer it’s going to be pretty difficult to figure out where to go.”

Obama was willing to go too far, but Boenher wouldn’t budge.  We knew the GOP would rather destroy a livable climate than let their pollutocrat backers suffer any reduction in profits — but  at least in that case  you could argue that some in the GOP were so anti-science they didn’t know what they were doing (see John Boehner says on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical”).

But the GOP has been told by their Wall Street backers that  failure to raise the debt ceiling would be an economic catastrophe.  The House GOP is too enthralled to the Tea Party extremists — backed by the  billionaire polluting Kochs — to care.