Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy limped into his skimpy majority on the fumes of 14 lost votes and the charity of a handful of people who hate him, but didn’t have an alternative and know that they ultimately control him anyway. So it can’t come as a surprise to anyone that his big blustery promises of 2022 are failing in the harsh light of 2023, and that trying to get a consensus in his party on something as momentous as the debt ceiling is beyond his means.
Start with his promise, from before the election, that there would be no debt ceiling increases or new government funding without cuts to Social Security and Medicare. That’s all over now, with McCarthy insisting that the programs are off the table. That’s after the GOP’s only higher power, Donald Trump, put the kibosh on it.
Now McCarthy’s left without a plan. Even more disastrously, he’s left with a leadership team and conference that has spent so much of the last decade and a half on culture wars that any policy-making muscle they ever had is completely atrophied. Granted, they were always weak—remember the years and years in which they failed to come up with any kind of plan to replace the Affordable Care Act? Ever since the Tea Party swept a new breed of Republicans in, revenge and tax cuts for the rich has been all they’ve managed to accomplish.
RELATED: Pressure from Democrats is creating cracks in McCarthy’s GOP House
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Now the disarray of the House GOP and the scant majority that allows McCarthy no defections is giving Democrats all the space they need to ignore Republican demands that they be allowed to have their way.
Biden is holding firm. There won’t be negotiations. “I will not let anyone use the full faith and credit of the United States as a bargaining chip,” Biden said last week. According to reporting from NBC News, the memory of how badly he and President Barack Obama got played in 2011 on a debt ceiling fight, the one that resulted in the first downgrading ever of the U.S. credit rating is key.
“Asking why it’s been 12 years since Democrats stopped paying ransom in exchange for Republicans not triggering an economic crisis is a self-defeating question,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told NBC News. “In 2011, the Obama-Biden administration negotiated in good faith but congressional Republicans’ recklessness caused an historic blow to our economy. That’s why the administration didn’t negotiate in 2013 or after.”
There’s plenty of room for Democrats to hang firm on refusing to negotiate because of McCarthy’s various weaknesses, and they’re taking it. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put it plainly: “No hostage-taking, no brinkmanship. Pass the debt ceiling.”
“Unfortunately, [McCarthy] let a group of very extreme people, he gave them the tools” Schumer told Politico. “The plan is to get our Republican colleagues in the House to understand they’re flirting with disaster and hurting the American people. And to let the American people understand that as well. And I think we’ll win.”
That’s not going to happen until the GOP has a funding fight and passes a budget; shows their work. Since they’ve set up a whole Freedom Caucus-demanded set of rules requiring them to slash and burn, now they’ve got to figure out how to do it. Which means plenty of sacred cows—like defense—being cut since mandatory spending for Social Security and Medicare is no longer in play.
The House GOP says they’re demanding that Biden and the Senate Democrats provide a budget plan first, and they won’t agree to raise the debt ceiling until they see that, but they aren’t saying where they’ll start. The new Budget Committee Chairman, Texan Jodey Arrington, is trying to put a brave face on it. “It won’t be easy,” he said, but he’s “looking forward to the challenge of pulling that 218 together so that we can know what it feels like to succeed, and know that we can succeed.”
Bless his little heart.
Former House Budget Chair, Diane Black (R-TN), is a little less optimistic. She isn’t in Congress any more, so has more room to be skeptical. “I think it’s a big lift,” Black said. “I don’t know, frankly, because of where they are right now … that they really have the time to dig in and do it that well. Maybe they do.”
Markos and Kerry are joined by University of St. Andrews Professor of Strategic Studies, Phillips P. O’Brien. O’Brien, an expert in military history, explains how we got to where we are right now, what is unique about the world’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the parallels between the conservative movement’s isolationism in World War II and now.