The MAGA House, with its teeny-tiny majority, is already running wild with a recycled Republican extortion scheme that failed 12 years ago. Natch. This is not a gang renowned for having any fresh ideas.
During last autumn’s midterm contests, Republicans didn’t campaign on a promise to sabotage full the faith and credit of the United States – in other words, preventing Uncle Sam from paying his bills, a move that would crash the economy and spark a new recession. They didn’t stump for votes on a promise to hold the government hostage unless President Biden agreed to slash spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, schools, student loans, the environment, or other domestic necessities.
Of course they didn’t campaign that way, because it would’ve been nuts.
Alas, now the nuts are in charge. They’re vowing to concoct a needless crisis – refusing to raise the US debt ceiling that lets the government borrow money in order to pay the bills for programs already approved by Congress. The debt ceiling has been routinely raised in bipartisan fashion during the past 100 years – 29 times under a Democratic president, and 49 times under a Republican president, including seven times under George W. Bush, 18 times under Ronald Reagan, and three times under Donald Trump. This was notably necessary during the Trump years, because he signed massive tax cuts for upper-income Americans, a move that cratered the budget deficit and widened the gap between the tax revenue coming in and the money Uncle Sam needed to pay bills.
But now that Joe Biden is president, House Republicans have suddenly decided that deficits and debts are important again; in MAGA puppet Kevin McCarthy’s words, they’re “one of the greatest threats…to this nation.” (The national debt soared by more than $7 trillion during Trump’s presidency, but never mind that.) So the plan is to threaten a disastrous default on US debt obligations – a move with dire global implications – unless Biden waves a white flag of surrender and agrees to scissor the popular federal safety net.
Biden says he won’t negotiate at all. And why should he? Democrats control the White House and the Senate; the MAGA Republicans barely eked out a House majority, and did so only with support from a serial-lying fraud who’s under criminal investigation everywhere from Nassau County to Brazil.
We hit the current debt ceiling Jan. 19, and the Treasury Department already announced that it would take “certain extraordinary measures” to prevent an immediate crisis. Not surprisingly, the GOP extortion scheme is getting bad reviews. For instance: “If the US government skips its payments to America’s seniors or skips its payments to bondholders, both of those things call into question the full faith and credit of the United States government and our commitment to paying our bills. And both of them have pretty catastrophic economic consequences.”
Did Biden say that? Nope. That was Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Here’s another: “Congress is playing with fire. (If we defaulted), the Dow would plunge by thousands of points per day and the credibility of the US – its trustworthiness as a country that pays its debts on time – would be substantially eroded … Republicans would have accomplished nothing.”
Did House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries say that? Nope. That was Michael Strain, an economist for the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
House Republicans aren’t exactly a font of new ideas; their impulse is to recycle the same extortion tactic that their predecessors tried back in 2011 when Barack Obama was president. Brian Riedel, a policy analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, recently recalled what happened: “Studying this in 2011 convinced us (Republicans) that this would really be a bad idea … We said, ‘Let’s avoid this at all costs because it’s going to be a disaster.’” Unfortunately, their gamesmanship did some damage; America’s credit rating was downgraded for the first and only time in history.
House Republicans even weighed trying the tactic again in 2014 – hey, why not threaten a default unless the Democrats agreed to slash Obamacare? – until sanity prevailed. John Boehner, the Republican Speaker, said: “Listen, we do not want to default on our debt, and we’re not going to default on our debt.” And Patrick Tiberi, a Boehner ally in the House, said: “At the end of the day, we still have to govern.”
The need to govern. What a concept! If only the freaks in the MAGA House would do their jobs instead of polishing their “brands” and serving up performative BS for Duh Base.
Hopefully, the Biden team will hew to its demand that House Republicans cease their extortion rhetoric and agree to raise the debt ceiling “without conditions.” I ‘m reminded of the scene in “Godfather II” when a corrupt senator tried to extort Michael Corleone. Michael’s instant reply:
“My offer is this. Nothing.”
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2023
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