House votes against raising debt ceiling, 318-97.

Which is a surprise, given that I didn’t think that there were 318 Republicans in the House… no, wait, there aren’t. 82 Democrats voted against raising the debt limit without accompanying spending cuts; which is highly entertaining, given that 114 House Democrats signed Rep. Peter Welch’s letter requesting… precisely this vote. Do compare the signatories to said letter with the no votes on HR 1954: you will notice an entertaining amount of overlap, there.

The hysterical bit? The Democrats are complaining that they didn’t get to add amendments to the bill, which is fairly straightforward:

SECTION 1. FINDING.
The Congress finds that the President’s budget proposal, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2012, necessitates an increase in the statutory debt limit of $2,406,000,000,000.

SEC. 2. INCREASE IN STATUTORY LIMIT ON THE PUBLIC DEBT.
Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof `$16,700,000,000,000′.

…which sounds exactly like the quote-unquote ‘clean extension’ that Welch and his colleagues called for, but did not reliably[*] vote for. Which tells you everything that you need to know about Democratic legislative courage… or, more accurately, the utter lack of same. That’s the moral of the story: when when it comes to screwing one’s courage to the sticking point on fiscal discipline, the Democrats in Congress will cave*. Good to know, yes?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Someone has told the Democratic members of Congress that they’re expected to work on creating a budget every year, yes? I ask merely because a dispassionate reading of recent legislative history does not support the assumption that anyone has told them.

[*75 of 114 is not in fact reliable.  It is in fact a very poor showing.]