[Gymnarnemia]

Lawrence O'Donnell had a very succinct breakdown of how this is working on Morning Joe this morning, based on his own time in the Senate during the Clinton administration and his current contacts on the Hill.

Key points:
-- This is all political cover. Each side (Obama, Dem Congress and Senate, GOP Congress and Senate) is going through a choreographed series of staged votes and speeches to allow them to be able to point at news clips verifying they fought for their base during election season.
-- Both the GOP and Dems know that the other side will clobber their standalone plans. But they'll keep stringing out votes until the 11th hour.
-- This is why the market has largely (up until the past couple of days) shrugged off the debt limit crisis. The assumption has been all along that once the kabuki process is done, Boehner and Reid would corral their conferences into a compromise bill and get things finished just under the wire.
-- The chaos of the past 36 hours surrounds Boehner's seeming inability to be able to corral his conference. The Tea Party group appears set on being a spoiler in the process. They may very well be performing their own version of kabuki with establishment Republicans to save face to their own constituency.
-- Ultimately, the political script is that both parties would find a sense of responsibility at the last minute and present president Obama with a grudging compromise. Depending on his own political ends, Obama could well reject that compromise and extract more concessions to end up with something that he can sign.


But again, the Tea Party caucus has gone off script. Which is why you're seeing veteran lawmakers begin to publicly scold them for mucking up the works.