As House Republican leaders struggled Thursday night to lock up enough votes to bring Speaker John Boehner's debt ceiling plan to the floor for a vote, metro Atlantans from across the political spectrum voiced dismay over the deepening stalemate.
Diane Fingarson, a Republican businesswoman who lives near Lake Lanier, praised the speaker and chided the Republican holdouts. “You need somebody like Boehner who has been very strategic, and he is a very patient person, but he has been demonized,” she said.
“What I hate the worst is that Republicans eat their own.”
June Wick of Kennesaw opposes any measure that would raise the debt ceiling. “I want them to balance the budget,” she said.
But even though she was content to see Boehner’s bill stall out -- at least for a few hours -- she was fed up with Congress' inability to act.
“We elect these people to go there, and they have the best consultants,” she said. “They need to work this out.”
Shaun King, a Democrat and the pastor of Courageous Church in midtown Atlanta, was ready to accept the Boehner bill in the name of moving forward.
“Let’s raise the debt ceiling and match it with painful cuts,” he said. “I’m OK with that.”
But Democrat Chris Strickland, a Gwinnett County school teacher, had little use for any proposal now on the table.
“I don’t like [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid’s plan any better than I do Boehner's, except for the fact that it gets us through the election,” he said. “We all know that when people are running for office you can’t get anything done.”
Even though he disliked Boehner’s plan, he expressed empathy for the GOP leader: “I feel sorry for Speaker Boehner,” he said. “I really feel like he’s over his head and has a caucus he can’t control.”
Dianne DeVore, a Roswell Republican, was already looking ahead to the possibility that, if Congress remains deadlocked through the weekend, Obama might act unilaterally, perhaps invoking the mandate in the Constitution that the nation’s debt shall always be honored.
“If Obama takes this into his own hands and uses the 14th Amendment,” she said, “that’s a dictator.”
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