If McConnell and Boehner won’t stand up to their crazy caucuses and begin to carve out some room to capitulate on the debt limit, I guess it’s up to the media to apply the pressure. They appear to have spent the July 4th holiday recharging and organizing for the task. It’s too early to identify a trend, but there is plenty of evidence that something is afoot. The columns are notable for their tone of disingenuous surprise. Over at The Nation, Jamelle Bowie expresses a common liberal frustration.
For at least four years, Republicans governed with few obstacles to their agenda, securing tax cuts, wars, unfunded new entitlements, and continued deregulation. The results were trillions of dollars in wasted spending, trillions more in lost revenue, deep dysfunction on nearly every level of government, and an economic crisis of nearly world-historical proportions. Despite this, media elites continue to treat the Republican Party – and the architects of its disastrous party – as credible voices on public policy, as if 2001 to 2008 never happened.
Worse, the media doesn’t act like the 2009-2010 Tea Party response to the Obama administration wasn’t a doubling-down on bad ideas that caused untold economic and human misery during the Bush years. If anything, the Tea Party is an ideology that jettisons everything good about the Bush administration and asks for much more of the bad. Bush’s policies were bad for blacks, and he continually worked to disenfranchise the black vote, but he also appointed the first two black Secretaries of State, the first black national security advisor, and the first black Secretary of Education. Bush’s policies were bad for Latinos, but he at least tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform with the help of Teddy Kennedy and John McCain. Bush’s War on Terror often imposed on the rights of Muslims here at home, but he consistently tried to tamp-down anti-Muslim feeling on the right. All of that is gone in the post-Bush Republican Party (note how Michael Steele lost his job at the RNC after presiding over the party’s biggest wins in memory).
On taxes, regulation, and economic policy, the Tea Party doesn’t want to merely return to the disastrous status quo of the pre-recession Bush era; they want even lower revenues and even less oversight, setting us up for bigger deficits, less economic security, and an easier environment to let greed run unfettered to the detriment of sound investment.
People humored conservatives for too long. It’s a little late to declare them beyond the pale of all decent and sane human conduct. Now we have a know-nothing party that is overrun by religious nuts, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes, greedheads, and straight-up kooks.
Both The Hill and the New York Times have articles today about how even the ludicrously insane House Republican caucus isn’t insane enough for their base. Many members are facing the real prospect of a primary challenge if they vote for any conceivable compromise on the debt limit.
This is both why I believe Boehner has to cave and why I fear he won’t. He has to cave because he can only raise the debt limit by crafting a bill that most Democrats want to support. He can’t cave because there is too much pressure on his members to do all kinds of things they simply don’t have the power to do.
It’s probably the case that Boehner has to choose between being responsible for the country defaulting on its debts and losing his job as Speaker. That’s not a painless choice, but it’s an obvious one.
What will he choose?
The media is trying to help him to make the right decision. They may convince Boehner of what he must do, but I doubt they’re capable, at this late stage in the game, of creating the space he needs to convince his crazy caucus and save his job.
we are so disastrously fucked. disastrously.
and people simply have nowhere to go, because the democrats are just as excited to cut spending, as long as there’s a little revenue thrown in.
so sad, even if it IS fun to watch boehner squirm.
oh, and yes: the media are defintiely trying a little too late to save the day. The NPR reporter sounded desperate this AM on the same topic.
Idiots. The lot of them.
I’m not going to pass judgment until the deed is done. There is a simmering backlash, but until it’s really real a lot of people can keep on pretending that the cuts won’t affect their grandma’s Medicaid that keeps her in a nursing home instead of their homes. That it’s those bad schools, not the school their precious goes to.
If Democrats fold, that shock happens on Main Street and all bets are off for both parties’ future. Likely that Obama will get re-elected but Congress and state legislatures are going to be in turmoil.
The only question is whether folks will double down on a corrupt system or start to fight it like they did a hundred years ago.
“He has to cave because he can only raise the debt limit by crafting a bill that most Democrats want to support.”
I still don’t see how that kind of bill would get any Republican support at all. Certainly not enough to push it over the top.
I’d rather him not do the right thing. The debt ceiling will be raised with or without him, and at least without him we won’t have to suffer a thousand cuts.
We can save the Democrats’ deficit/debt fetish for the next budget. I’d rather not go on this merry-go-round twice. I already lost one job opportunity thanks to these assholes, and now with $50k of debt I need to find one before November; I’d rather the economy not lose any more jobs thanks to it. Luckily I don’t have a mortgage payment.
And people are somewhat worried about the precedent this will set, but I am not one of them. The debt ceiling shouldn’t exist in the first place. I’m not talking from a 14th Amendment standpoint, either. It’s simply a stupid and inane idea. Make it go away by giving the power to Treasury to spend the money it was told to spend.
Yep, Congress authorizes the spending and the revenues. If it doesn’t have the discipline to keep an eye where the budget is going, a balanced budget amendment or a debt ceiling bill is not going to stop them. These are diversions from them doing their jobs.
Balanced budget amendment, debt ceiling—both are strawmen.
seriously, yo.
Fuck them, use the 14th amendment.
Be aware what “using the 14th amendment” means. It means that the President has the Constitutional obligation to make sure that the US does not default even in the face of Congressional decisions that move in that direction. That means that he has to suck the wind out of the short-sellers in the bond market who have be driving momentum in that direction. The easiest way is to reduce spending dramatically in the areas that are currently sacred cows and to make sure that every one of those debt service payments occurs on schedule.
The President can reprogram funds to improve enforcement of existing tax laws to raise revenue. He can cut spending wherever he sees poor priorities and dare the Republicans to tell him he can’t. He can shift funds around to make sure that default doesn’t happen and that we still can get out of the recession, and dare Republicans to tell him he can’t.
And he can shut down part of or all of the government (except for revenue collection) if Congress does not have a continuing resolution or budget authorization in place October 1.
What the Republicans want to do is make Social Security beneficiary subsidiary creditors of the US debt. Permanently. The want to make Alan Simpson’s “empty IOUs” talk come true.
The 14th amendment route does not authorize the collection of additional revenues than are authorized by law, nor does it really deal with the debt besides offering creditors the option to demand a higher interest rate for funding more debt.
The catch-22 is that if interest rates on government debt go up, it raises the bar on ROI for private investment, which tends to be more risky than government debt.
I (think) I agree with this.
In any case, I don’t understand how 14th amendment will somehow save us. All the amendment says is that the government cannot voluntarily choose to default on its debt. In other words, if there is money in the treasury, it must be used to pay existing bonds. I don’t see how it can be used to prevent default if there is no money in the treasury. Certainly, it would be quite a stretch to say that it authorizes positive action to prevent default, such as the issuing of new bonds without congressional authorization, or (even more radically) the imposition of a new tax.
Bonds don’t all come due at once. The job of the Secretary of Treasury–the key, better not miss it job–is to schedule the repayment and extension of debt in order to conform to the 14th amendment. There are revenues coming in from taxes all the time. The Treasury can issue new bonds to restructure the debt without extending the total.
What is helpful about blowing through the debt ceiling is that the President is no longer restricted artificially. Congress through its tax laws and appropriations has set the bounds of the debt. The debt ceiling doesn’t authorize anything, except in the eyes of Congress. And the optics of breaking the debt ceiling has caused Presidents to go back to Congress.
The President then can fulfill the will of Congress in its tax laws and appropriations without the meddling of Congress. So the President can withhold spending on less urgent or important things (not just release of funds, but deferring obligations) in order to preserve the more important things.
This is helpful because it legally takes it out of the political nonsense of the Congress. (Not unlike the concern of the writers of the 14th amendment that members of Congress from Southern states on re-entry to the union would either want to repudiate the US debt for the war or insist that the Confederate debt be covered so as to bail out creditors to the CSA).
too little too late. as you point out, no one bothered to call the GOP out on doubling down on the craziness after the 2008 election. The tea party will probably go down in history as one of the greatest messaging/marketing campaigns in political history- it gave McConnell a smokescreen to organize his caucus into a parliamentary style party intent on obstruction and extremism. All this was pretty clear from February 2009 (the huge tell of what was going on inside the GOP caucus was Judd Gregg’s rejection of Commerce Secretary position offered to him) but it wasn’t a story any reporter was interested in trying to understand.
This will get done, but the dems will give a lot more. I can see something that gets this done like putting in place ticking time bombs that essentially end medicare and medicaid if certain debt targets aren’t reached. THe GOP hits the bid here because of course they can then obstruct and defund anything and everything that would help us reach those debt targets, like tax increases. The dems do the deal because they are desperate.
“It’s probably the case that Boehner’s has to choose between being responsible for the country defaulting on its debts and losing his job as Speaker. That’s not a painless choice, but it’s an obvious one.”
It’s not even clear that Boehner can get a bill through, whether he wants to or not. How many Republicans will fall into line with him when he throws himself on his sword? That makes it even more unlikely he’ll choose being responsible, when there’s no guarantee that will work.
We better hope like heck for a party line vote in the House for raising the debt ceiling. Make the Republicans have to vote for raising the debt ceiling–every single one of them. Make Boehner carry the full freight of getting the agreement through.
Democrats have ample reason to vote against it because of the cuts or just to vote Present.
Um, no. Just no.
Remember the TARP vote. The nation does not like to see its Congress act like panicky mules in crunch time. No games. It always backfires on everybody.
Tragically, it’s the nation itself’s fault for voting in the Congress it despises, but that’s a problem so beyond anyone’s grasp it’s not even worth worrying about…
The game has already backfired on everybody. We’re talking about the House here. Given the GOP majority, it would suit me if no Democrats voted for the deal that has been outlined. But there is always Heath Shuler wanting to do the GOP’s work for them. Boehner can deliver the bill out of the House.
The Senate is a different matter. It is a check on any funny business in the rule brought forward by the House. If the agreement makes it through the House with a party-line vote, let Kent Conrad and his buddies see that it passes in order for the President to say a deal’s a deal.
The risk for Democrats in the House is an ad campaign accusing them of cutting Medicare and Social Security as a part of Obama’s plan. The GOP game in this is to try to flank the Democrats on the left. A more substantial version of what they did with the Medicare argument in 2010.
Politics is such a fucking bizarro zone. I will never understand it. Reality is ever malleable.
For two years, the constant story on the left was that Steele was a self-promoting, self-destructive clown who couldn’t run a 7/11 and was leaving his party with ridiculous financial chaos. And it was all true. Was it not? Why wouldn’t he be fired, regardless of how well the party did on its own, independent of his organization? Now his forced retirement is further evidence of Republican racism? Did we not have enough already? Were the fifty years prior insufficient?
I don’t know, I feel like my mind is getting warped by this shit every day now. I have no idea what the debt compromise is even supposed to be based on. How do we even know who’s “caving” anymore? How do we define caving when we have no idea what the actual parameters of what anybody in power is actually about anymore?
The Republicans can’t take yes for an answer, right? Their sole goal is the destruction of the welfare state by any means necessary. So anything short of that is a political loss. They’ve set themselves up to fail through their own radicalism.
But the President can’t take no for an answer, right? Because if he has to avail himself of extraconstitutional measures to wipe out the very notion of the “debt limit” itself, his political advisers are going to rip their hair out. Because he’s owning the entire fake debt issue all by himself. And Republicans will make sure independents spend the next 16 months hearing about it, and the two trillion that the “ultimate tax and spend, dictatorial thug liberal” took out on our children’s future from those nefarious chinamen to pay off ACORN or whatever while the economy remains a stagnant, corporate-run mess. And without showing himself willing to cut spending to the broader public, I don’t know how Obama would then win on larger tax reform. Which puts him in an awful mess, now, politically and fiscally long term. So he has to make a deal that includes congressional ownership.
And the Democrats? Who the fuck even knows anymore. And that’s really the problem. Who the fuck even knows anymore.
If Michael Steele hadn’t been an embarrassing token (if he had been a white guy) he would have been sainted and allowed to continue to run the RNC like a drunken sailor.
If Michael Steele wasn’t an embarrassing token, he never would have gotten the job in the first place.
It’s not like it’s a job with a limited pool of candidates angling for it. I just don’t see how anybody, black or white, justifies keeping their job with their books in such a mess, when its peer organizations are having no such problem.
That Steele had no backers at all in the end was evidence of racism probably, but I wouldn’t have said it was racist to go in a different direction after the election, from a distance.
The guy was one-in-a-million inept.
That he never would have had the job in the first place is probably irrelevant, or it supports my case.
If they didn’t need him anymore because he’d succeeded in his task (being a useful token), that supports what I’m saying.
My point is that a white guy who presided over such an ass-whupping of Democrats would have been sainted, regardless of how bad the books looked.
14th amendment, here we come
New speaker by Christmas, regardless.
Liberalism is good!
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Tweety said it tonight — they would go against their country in order to hurt this President.
If Tweety said it, it must be sticking out like a sore thumb in DC. Republicans must be so confident that they’re openly bragging about their strategy. Takes a lot for what’s going on to make it to normally clueless Tweety’s brain.
Who was it said elections have consequences?
Oh, right.
The chimp who got elected.
Twice.