Torrey Westrom is a state senator in the reddish-purple SD12. He's the GOP nominee challenging US Rep. Colin Peterson in CD7, and presumably he'll be seeking reelection to his senate seat in 2016 (so yes, sticking to my prediction Peterson wins reelection). He recently gave an interview to the St. Cloud Times where he engaged in double denying, hitting both climate change and the debt ceiling.
Maybe "denial" isn't quite the right word for the debt ceiling since he plainly knows the debt ceiling is real. He does seem to be in denial about the catastrophe that would be unleashed should the government smack into the debt ceiling and be unable to borrow enough money to pay its bills. If you need a reminder of how we nearly had a financial crisis on the scale of 2008, only this time with a Congress looking to commit sabotage rather than defuse the crisis, read "Why the debt ceiling clash happened". Sen. Westrom seems to be among those who need the reminder, judging from what he told the Times, "Westrom told the Times that he wouldn't vote to increase the federal debt ceiling unless Congress strikes a deal with President Barack Obama to balance the federal budget."
Does he understand that if the government runs out of borrowing authority, bills go unpaid, including bond payments, Social Security, vendors' bills, payroll, the whole thing? Does he get the long term implications of the government failing to pay its bills not because it can't, but because it can but won't? Republicans talked in 2010 about using the debt ceiling to force Democrats to agree to massive spending cuts when they realized they would definitely take the US House, and made good on their threat in 2011. When dreaming of the leverage they would get, they did so realizing how serious the impact would be.
Without that willingness to play chicken with the whole economy at stake, they had no leverage. Yet when Democrats weren't backing down (they tried, but with nothing ever being enough, they finally got it through their heads the Republicans were engaging in blackmail, not negotiations), big business got scared and told Republicans not to do this. We learned that there are some Republicans for whom ideology and beating Democrats is more important even than the needs of big business, so they responded by the psychologically odd measure of denying the debt ceiling was no big deal. At the same time, they believed the government and economy would cope just fine, and that it was such a disaster that the Democrats would cave to save the economy.
Is that what Torrey Westrom is doing? When he says, "Sometimes urgency is what gets the most action done," and "You've got to have a pathway to a balanced budget. We can't sustain this course," it becomes obvious he doesn't know the deficit has been dropping rapidly, not just in absolute terms, but also relative to the federal budget and the economy. Since he sees the deficit as so serious, then his threat to crash into the debt ceiling means he gets how serious that is and he thinks Republicans should act with gross irresponsibility in order to blackmail the Democrats. Maybe he's engaging in that double-think where it's very serious and not serious at the same time, depending on whether you're threatening Democrats or mollifying scared businessmen.
Maybe it's none of the above. Maybe he's just repeating the talking points that help candidates in Republican primaries, and doesn't understand what the debt ceiling does. Plenty of Republican congressmen showed they had no idea, thus why Paul Ryan, in a moment of honesty (must have felt strange to him) tried to explain it to his colleagues in 2011 --- with limited success. Many Republicans, and this might include Westrom, think that refusing to raise the debt ceiling somehow means not spending money. No (cripes, having to explain this to someone running for Congress!). The appropriations bills spend the money. The debt ceiling stops the government's ability to borrow beyond a certain amount. What the people using the debt ceiling for leverage are doing is simultaneously ordering the president to spend money while prohibiting him from paying the bills.
So you're telling the president to haul out the credit card and buy certain stuff, but then you're ordering him to ignore the credit card statement. Does this finally make sense Sen. Westrom?
On climate change, Westrom attacked Peterson for voting for the climate bill in 2009 that included cap-and-trade to reduce emissions. Peterson had been an unreliable vote on climate, but at least he's a realist. He doesn't need to be convinced it's real; convinced it's serious enough to do something about is another question, but at least he gets it's real. Get Westrom, who has what seems like a somewhat unique variation of denialism:
Many cap-and-trade supporters are concerned that the Earth's climate is warming. An overwhelming majority of climate scientists say the warming very likely is caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions.
But Westrom says he isn't sold on the existence of man-made climate change.
"The science hasn't been that convincing," Westrom said. "Obviously there's been some climate change or warming for centuries, or we would still be under a glacier."
Right, the changing climate can't be caused by humans because ... the ice age is over. With such deep thinking, I can readily believe he doesn't find the science convincing. And never will
Westrom is a good example of how we should stop trying to convince climate change deniers and just beat them politically. Westrom won't be convinced, so keep him out of public office. Despite the congressional campaign committees spending money on CD7, I'll believe Westrom can pull this off when I see polling data to that effect, assuming there is any before election day. However, beating him in 2016 will be tougher. But possible. And worth doing. No more public offices for the willfully ignorant.
cross-posted at MN Progressive Project