(This is adapted from the intro to my webpage about Obama's July 31 messages. I am a member of the currently notorious NH House of Representatives, and I was famous for a few days about a year ago.)
I am not crazy about the agreement that the President and the Congress arrived at to end the debt ceiling crisis, but it's better than a financial meltdown, and it's better than a constitutional crisis. Hopefully, it will work out in the end. Hopefully, I will continue to be hopeful.
My biggest concern is that Obama won't be able to make good on the promises to protect programs which benefit the middle and working classes. Working people do not have the highest-paid lobbyists on their side— and the Republicans are openly hostile to working people.
I am sure the Republicans in Congress are as happy as everyone else that financial Armageddon has been put off for a while. But they paid a huge price. For starters, Obama came out of this crisis looking good: they presumably aren't very happy about that, especially when the 2012 election is just around the corner. The Republicans came very close to denying health insurance to tens of millions of additional Americans: this failure must be (literally) a hard pill for the Republicans to swallow. The Pell Grant program has been saved, allowing young working- and middle-class people to go to college at taxpayers' expense, competing for grades and jobs with the children of the rich: the Republicans can't be too happy about that. There are many other provisions in the plan which will displease the Republicans.
The so-called "Super Congress" can be relied on to look first to tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the rest of us to balance the budget. But, the Super Congress's plan still has to be approved later this year by the rest of the Congress. Should the Super Congress be unable to sell their plan to the Infra Congress, the default value is that defense spending would be cut along with discretionary non-defense spending. However, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment insurance, programs for poor families, and federal retirement would not be cut under the default budgetary plan. That has to anger— and scare— the Republicans.
On a happier note, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot on January 8, 2011 by a demented rightwinger, came back and cast her first vote on August 1. She voted for the bipartisan debt-ceiling compromise.