Hoist by their own hubris

The vote was on the Republican Study Committee's alternative budget -- a radical plan that annihilates the social contract in America by putting the GOP budget on steroids. Deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, more severe entitlement rollbacks.

Normally something like that would fail by a large bipartisan margin in either the House or the Senate. Conservative Republicans would vote for it, but it would be defeated by a coalition of Democrats and more moderate Republicans. But today that formula didn't hold. In an attempt to highlight deep divides in the Republican caucus. Dems switched their votes -- from "no" to "present."

Panic ensued. In the House, legislation passes by a simple majority of members voting. The Dems took themselves out of the equation, leaving Republicans to decide whether the House should adopt the more-conservative RSC budget instead of the one authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. As Dems flipped to present, Republicans realized that a majority of their members had indeed gone on the record in support of the RSC plan -- and if the vote closed, it would pass. That would be a slap in the face to Ryan, and a politically toxic outcome for the Republican party.

So they started flipping their votes from "yes" to "no."

Andrea Mitchell: Are you going to wrap that Medicare vote around Republicans as they go into this campaign season?

Steve Israel: This is a defining vote. Many of these Republicans came to Washington on the backs of commercials paid for by special interests that said "when I get to Washington,I will protect medicare." And in the first four months of their service here, not only did they not protect Medicare, they ended it, terminated it, put it our of business. And we're going to make sure those Republicans are held accountable for this unbelievable hypocrisy, and not just the hypocrisy, but it's going to cost senior citizens an additional 12,000 a year while protecting those oil company CEOs.

Mitchell: Do you have a problem with your own base though? We're going to be talking to Richard Trumka on Monday. But when you really get into the Continuing Resolution the President's going to be signing today --- the rest of this budget year not to confuse it with the Ryan budget --- the White House, you Democrats all signed on to this.

I've been talking to people in the health field, you know federal office holders, that the CDC in Atlanta got totally whacked in that CR. That we're not going to have all sorts of protections for people on health issues because the Centers for Disease Control were put on the chopping block and the president and all of you went along with that. That wasn't a Republican initiative, that was a compromise.

Israel: Well the unfortunate reality is that we have a Republican majority in the House of representatives that was willing to shut down the government, that was willing to throw 800 thousand federal employes out of work, that was willing to throw more people out of work because of the multiplier effect. If you're a federal employee, you lose your job, you can't go out and buy pizza for your family. So they were willing to hold millions of Americans literally hostage to an extreme agenda that said women can't go to Planned Parenthood to get health care.

Did we have to compromise? Yes. Was it a compromise that I didn't particularly like? Yes it was. It is five month compromise. That is the common ground. We were forced to find common ground with them.