House Republicans are in a triumphant mood already, continuing to plan for what they are sure will be their 2023 majority by telegraphic every dangerous and unpopular move they plan to make up to and including threatening the global economy. They’re not even waiting for their eventual majority to start next year, but intend to put their plans to undermine American democracy to work just as soon as Congress returns for the lame-duck session in mid-November.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, gloated to reporters that Republicans will fight to keep any further Ukraine aid from being authorized this year, under the guise of saying it’s “unrelated” funding to keep the government running. Turner wasn’t foolish enough to suggest that the pro-Russia, pro-Putin wing of the caucus will ensure that funding for Ukraine dries up.
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“The problem with Ukraine funding support in the House is not Ukraine,” Turner told reporters. “It’s all the things that are being attached to it that have nothing to do with Ukraine,” speaking of the funding bill that will have to be passed by Dec. 13, when the current continuing resolution expires. If Republicans win either chamber, he said, “it’s going to be difficult to get Republicans to support anything as the Democrats try to get over the line a number of spending bills that are going to be an amalgamation of unrelated items that they want to get done before they lose those gavels.”
That Turner is being so careful to suggest that the GOP wouldn’t entirely abandon Ukraine is curious, since his leader, Kevin McCarthy, already suggested he’ll crater to Trump and his acolytes and do Russia’s bidding. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” McCarthy said last week when asked about the future of Ukraine funding under a Republican-held Congress. “It’s not a free blank check.”
Turner might be smarter than McCarthy enough to know you’re not supposed to say that out loud, so instead, he went with the “unrelated” line. That’s also going to be what Republicans will argue if Democrats try to do something to de-weaponize the debt limit next year. McCarthy has already rubber-stamped plans to threaten default on the debt ceiling to force cuts Social Security, Medicare, and safety-net programs. It’s economic terrorism that Democrats will need to thwart before the end of the year.
The combined issues of debt ceiling default and abandoning Ukraine also pose real national security threats as well as danger to democracy and stability around the globe. Historian Timothy Snyder, a leading writer and thinker on democracy and the rising global authoritarianism, spoke of the dangers with the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
He takes the Republican threat “very seriously, because democracy around the world depends on Ukrainians winning this war,” he told Sargent. “We are actually on the verge of winning in Ukraine. We’re also on the verge of a tipping point back toward democratic institutions, and I don’t mean just in the West; I mean around the world. An awful lot hinges on Russia losing and Ukraine winning.”
“The tipping point can also go the other way,” he continued. “If the Ukrainians hadn’t fought—or if they had already lost—we would have already seen a tipping point where authoritarianism and Putin-style nihilism would be much more popular.” He added, “Right now, we have an opportunity for a positive tipping point. We could throw it all away if we do the wrong thing after November. Things could go either extremely well or extremely poorly.”
The threat is just as real when it comes to global economic security with the debt ceiling. Even making the kind of threats the Republicans are currently engaging in is potentially destabilizing. Pile on top of that the threat that the world’s most successful democracy is vulnerable to the Big Lie and the authoritarian impulses that have taken over the Republican Party. We’re at a pretty terrifying inflection point.
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How should we be reading the 2022 polls, in light of shifting margins and past misses? In this week’s episode of The Downballot Public Policy Polling's Tom Jensen joins us to explain how his firm weights polls to reflect the likely electorate; why Democratic leads in most surveys this year should be treated as smaller than they appear because undecided voters lean heavily anti-Biden; and the surprisingly potent impact abortion has had on moving the needle with voters despite our deep polarization.