Never Again...
If you think that old dogs can't learn new tricks you need to take a look at Joe Biden. Back in 2011, during the first serious Republican debt ceiling hostage crisis and the protracted negotiations that followed, Biden undercut Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and wrecked a deal he had made for a terrible one. There was a lot of hand-wringing at the time over Biden's tendency to give away the store so when the Republicans pulled their hostage maneuver again in 2013, Reid stipulated that Biden needed to stay out of the negotiations — and the White House agreed.
The Obama administration, including Biden, had learned their lesson: Negotiating with the extremist GOP on the debt ceiling is a very bad idea. They refused and the Republicans capitulated, sparing the country and the world economy another jolt. The days of dreaming about a "Grand Bargain" were blessedly over.
You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace.
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had come into office with the goal of ending the partisan divide once and for all by negotiating with the Republicans in good faith and taking all the thorny issues of the day off the table. E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post explained it just before Obama was sworn in:
Obama regularly offers three telltale notions that will define his presidency -- if events allow him to define it himself: "sacrifice," "grand bargain" and "sustainability."
To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable. That's where sacrifice kicks in. There will be signs of it in Obama's first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions. His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.
The "grand bargain" they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts -- and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.
Not one Republican came to the table to negotiate on the Affordable Care Act. When it came time for all that sacrifice and sustainability they dug in their heels and demanded that Obama eliminate his signature achievement and cut more taxes or the country gets it. It was a hard-earned lesson of the first Obama term: The modern Republican Party does not act in good faith. They argue among themselves constantly, with the far-right faction continually upping the ante even when leadership has made a deal. You can't negotiate with people like this when you have a metaphorical weapon aimed at your head.
The debt ceiling is an anachronistic, unnecessary procedure that should have been scrapped altogether long ago. (The Democrats probably should have tried harder to do that when they had both houses although the Diva Twins, Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia's Joe Manchin probably made that impossible.) The nation has to pay its bills and this formerly pro-forma vote is now often used as a political cudgel to try to force spending cuts because holding the world economy hostage provides more leverage than the normal budget process.
You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace, which is interesting. They held both chambers of Congress during his first two years and surely for the good of the country they could have made these same demands, but they didn't. Neither did they enact a budget with the spending cuts they are now insisting must be enacted or else. In fact, we hardly talked about any of this during Trump's term, all of which proves their overwhelming hypocrisy on this issue and explains why Democrats are saying, "talk to the hand."
Today, Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership are firmly refusing to negotiate around the debt ceiling, which is as it should be. There is a process for cutting spending, if that's what these Republicans want to do, and it's called appropriations. They can negotiate night and day in the budget talks and use every trick in the book to get their way with that (and there are a few.) But they cannot be allowed to pull this bs over and over again. If they want draconian spending cuts to happen they have to bargain for them or win a real majority and pass legislation like normal elected officials.
Unfortunately, the Republicans once more have a great friend in the media which is always inexplicably drawn to the idea of spending cuts and are once again pushing stories of fiscal doom due to deficits. (Weirdly, they too didn't say a peep during the Trump years when he was running up the debt without restraint.) Pundits love to insist that we must "learn to take our medicine" many of whom are well-off celebrities who will face little hardship from the "shared" pain and cost such policies will bring.
And when it comes to describing the politics of the situation they seem to be constitutionally incapable of accurately reporting that the Republicans are threatening to destroy the economy in order to force draconian spending cuts under a Democratic president while the Democrats are simply doing what they do under both Republican and Democratic presidents: paying the bills. Instead, they are laying the responsibility for the potential default on the debt on Biden, who is apparently falling down on the job if he doesn't capitulate to the insane demands of a bunch of radical extremists who very often won't take yes for an answer anyway. It's absurd and luckily, so far, the Democrats are standing fast.
Late Sunday night, Axios published a story with this headline: Congressional Democrats splinter on debt ceiling strategy. Apparently, a few centrist members of the House "Problem Solvers caucus" and the above-mentioned Diva, Joe Manchin, want to negotiate. That's no surprise. There are also a few Republicans who voted against Kevin McCarthy's wrecking ball of a bill that the House passed last week requiring the repeal of Biden's signature legislation. There are a few defections at the margins in both parties, making it a wash.
Overall, the Democrats are hanging tough: a clean debt ceiling vote, period. It's what has to be done. Unless we want to just cash in our chips and give Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene lifetime appointments to run the country, this hostage taking has to stop. The damage they did with this gambit back in 2011 is still being felt and the country can't afford another round of that insanity.
