Demagoguery is a two-way street.
When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy revealed his plan to couple spending cuts and revisions to the Democrats’ preferred social programs with a debt-ceiling hike, it seemed to me like a risky bet.
The substance of the speaker’s proposal wasn’t overly ambitious — particularly since the stakes of his gamble were limited by the improbability that his proposals would get a fair hearing from Democrats in the Senate and White House. His plan to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or until March 2024 (whichever came first) would be linked to capping discretionary spending at 2022 levels. Indeed, by abandoning the desire to return to pre-pandemic spending rates, McCarthy had actually moved slightly in the Democrats’ direction.
Beyond that, McCarthy sought to reclaim unobligated funds appropriated to address the Covid emergency, which is now over. The measure would also include augmented work requirements for eligible, able-bodied recipients of federal relief programs, and it would pare back the provisions in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that had nothing whatsoever to do with inflation. In sum, it was an unobjectionable opening bid.
But plenty of Republicans — the only intended audience for McCarthy’s pitch — objected, nonetheless. Some of the GOP’s good-faith deficit hawks wanted to see meaningful reductions to the rates of growth in the programs that really drive America’s debt. Others weren’t keen on the politically risky prospect of tinkering with anti-poverty programs like Medicaid. And a handful of Republicans said they wouldn’t vote to raise the debt limit under any circumstances. McCarthy had his work cut out for him.
But the squeakiest wheels in the Republican conference were soon drowned out by a chorus of GOP lawmakers expressing support for the deal. Conservatives within the Republican coalition, in particular, made their support known — an organizational coup for the speaker and his allies. The holdouts still wanted to see revisions to the deal, and McCarthy’s office insisted that no changes would be forthcoming. But in a 2 a.m. vote in the Rules Committee on Wednesday morning, some amendments were made. The Committee tightened the rules around work requirements to appease recalcitrant members such as Representative Matt Gaetz and bought off Midwestern members by striking a provision that would eliminate tax credits for biofuels such as ethanol.
McCarthy felt confident enough to bring the bill to the floor. And, although Republican leadership lost the four GOP votes he could afford to lose (including Gaetz, his sop from the Rules Committee apparently notwithstanding), the measure passed on Wednesday evening.
The White House and Senate Democrats have so far operated on the assumption that Republicans were too disunited to be worth negotiating with. They convinced themselves of the bizarre notion that the GOP got everything it wanted by holding the nation’s credit rating “hostage” in 2011, and they were resolved to avoid making the same mistake again. But as I told NPR on Wednesday morning, voters in 2022 saw fit to hand control of the chamber from which all spending bills must originate to the GOP. That political reality would — indeed, must — compel Democrats to negotiate with their Republican counterparts on spending if McCarthy united his conference behind his plan. Still, Joe Biden’s party maintains that it is still unconvinced.
The party in control of the White House is ready to demagogue the Republican bill to death, according to Politico’s reporting. The party will pound the table on the GOP’s plan to increase work requirements for federal beneficiaries and attack the efforts to rescind the spending devoted to climate change in a law that was supposedly designed to restore price stability. Demagoguery is, however, a two-way street.
Will Democrats risk default merely to preserve the unspent funds American taxpayers devoted to an emergency that’s over, Republicans might ask? Do Democrats want to play chicken with America’s credit rating in defense of the orgy of spending on climate-related giveaways passed under the surreptitious guise that it somehow puts downward pressure on inflation? Is returning to last year’s discretionary spending levels such an apocalyptic prospect that the party in power would put the country’s finances at risk? If cutting spending in exchange for a debt ceiling hike is such an abdication of responsibility, why was that precise sequence of events routine for so many years leading up to this impasse?
Indeed, with Republicans united, it’s the Democrats who are now starting to blink. “He should negotiate on the budget,” Senator Amy Klobuchar said of Biden on Sunday. “That is the place to negotiate, and they should start those negotiations now.” Senator Joe Manchin agreed, adding that McCarthy’s is the “only bill actually moving through Congress that would prevent default.” House Democrats such as Representatives Debbie Dingell and Greg Landsman are also starting to publicly sour on the White House’s strategy of stonewalling House Republicans.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, Representative Suzan DelBene, told Politico that “Republicans are going to be held accountable for not governing.” If Republicans are “not governing” both when they’re squabbling amongst each other and when they’re united behind a bill that does what Democrats want to see done — hike the debt ceiling — this line of attack is facile throat-clearing. McCarthy’s movement in the Democrats’ direction and the fact that the GOP controls just one of the levers of power in Washington suggests that Republicans only need a face-saving concession from Democrats to move beyond this debt-ceiling crisis. And with the Republican position strengthening and Democrats’ eroding, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the White House consents to good-faith negotiations with their Republican counterparts. The sooner, the better, too, because time is running out.