Boehner failed. Now what

Washington awoke Friday morning to a possibility that has been widely shrugged off for weeks, but suddenly seems chillingly real: Could the government actually default?

The delay and disintegration of a House vote on the debt limit late Thursday is the latest sign that Congress is mired in legislative gridlock just four days before the Aug. 2 deadline for lifting the country’s borrowing authority.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed to return to his bill Friday, but Thursday’s chaos — hours of private meetings, praying and postponed votes — raises fresh concerns that the country is stumbling toward a possible default and downgrade of its credit rating.

“I felt for some time that a default was likely,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, told POLITICO. “Now, it’s more likely than not.”

Democrats predicted the postponed vote would provide the leverage they need to convince Boehner to take a different course, one that involves striking an agreement that can pass the House and Senate with bipartisan support.

Despite the disarray, Democrats and Republicans actually aren’t that far apart on a possible compromise. It’s really just a question of whether the White House and congressional leaders, particularly the House speaker, choose to seal the deal.

Boehner is the wild card. He will quickly need to decide if he should push a bill through the House with Democratic votes — a move certain to infuriate conservatives already angry with the direction of the talks. That appears to be the only way Congress will avert a default.

But Boehner has shown no willingness to take this step, alarming the White House and Senate leaders who have been quietly shaping the contents of a deal that could move through Congress rapidly by the deadline or within a few days of it.

Another possibility is that Boehner pulls back and moves to his right. His speakership is undoubtedly endangered, and it's possible he will choose to shore up his flank rather than raise the debt ceiling. That would be dangerous for the economy, but it is not, given last night's humiliation, unthinkable.

Perhaps the primary wild card is what happens when the market opens today. If Wall Street assesses this as yet another day of Washington nonsense en route to an inevitable deal, then congressional leaders will find they have a bit more time to dawdle and negotiate. If the market decides that Boehner's inability to control his caucus is evidence that things really are different this time, it could drop precipitously. If that happens, the leadership of both parties might dispense with the legislation meant to message and figure out how to pass the legislation meant to lift the debt ceiling. It would be about time.

It's really not that hard to see what the final deal will eventually look like. And in a sense, last night's vote -- or, more to the point, non-vote -- is irrelevant to it. Boehner was aways going to need to assemble a coalition of more moderate Republicans and Democrats to get a deal. Last night's vote was a referendum on Boehner, but it had little to do with reaching an actual deal. So the optimistic spin is that the GOP's failure will move the Republican leadership to embrace the bipartisan strategy they were always going to have to adopt at the end. The pessimistic spin is that they now know pushing a compromise bill through the House could truly harm their careers and will hide from it. But they can only hide for so long. That's the problem with being in the leadership. Eventually, you have to lead.