Sometime during the next session of Congress, Republicans will check the box on one of their perennial agenda items whenever a Democrat is president: Threatening to crash the entire U.S. economy if the president doesn't submit to their demand to slash the safety net of senior citizens.
Leading up to the midterm elections, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, did a lot of thinking out loud about entitlement "reform" (meaning cuts to Social Security and Medicare) that Republicans might undertake should the expected red wave bring them into the majority. Around the same time, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy began talking about the spending cuts a putative House majority would force by using the extension of the statutory debt limit as a bargaining chip, although he refused to be precise as to which programs would be slashed.
