House GOP ransom note discovered!
Tuesday evening, the House will vote on a clean debt-limit increase, a vote designed to prove that Republicans are in fact willing to
shoot the hostage by allowing the federal government to default on its obligations if they don't get their way on spending cuts.
But while the vote will surely fail, the reason it will fail isn't that it would be impossible to build majority support for a clean debt-limit increase: it's that House Republican leaders scheduled it using rules that will require a two-thirds vote for passage.
The House is in session this week, which is out of keeping with recent tradition. Usually they're adjourned for the week of Memorial Day. But since they were just in recess the week before last, that wasn't likely to happen again quite so soon.
First up (aside from the usual raft of suspensions) is a debt ceiling increase bill, which is itself coming to the floor under suspension of the rules. Why? Because it's a "clean" increase, meaning there are none of the Republicans' outrageous hostage-taking provisions attached to it. So they're bringing it to the floor under a procedure designed to cause it to fail, since passage under suspension of the rules requires a 2/3 vote. And after it fails to clear that artificially high barrier, Republicans will insist that this illustrates that there's no appetite in Congress for a clean increase.
Republicans must be afraid that if Democrats were to position a 'yes' vote as a vote to save Medicare from Republican cuts, enough Republicans would cross the line to create a majority. Setting the threshold at two-thirds ensures that no such dynamic will come into play, and likely guarantees a heavy vote against raising the debt limit, because most elected official would rather not go on record voting for legislation to raise the debt limit when they know the legislation won't pass.
The vote is designed to show that Republicans are in a strong strong negotiating position on the debt limit, but what it really shows is that they are afraid of losing their own members. Remember, Republicans control a majority of seats in the House; if they were really confident their caucus was unified, they wouldn't be setting the threshold so high. If anything, the vote should embolden Democrats to hold their ground and protect both Medicare and the other essential programs that Republicans hope to cut.