Middle Ground

At this point, I think many of the House Republicans have stopped even trying to interact with reality. Last night, the House passed the Cut, Cap and Balance measure put forward by the Tea Party types. It can’t pass the Senate, and even if it could, it couldn’t be enacted in time to prevent default on the U.S. debt. Everyone in Washington knows it can’t work. So why do it at all? It seems pretty sad if they’re doing this meaningless dance just to polish their bona fides for their next re-election campaign.

It’s not that they don’t have a point. It’s true that the country has more of a spending problem than a revenue problem. Spending cuts have to be a larger part of the deficit reduction (elimination?) than do revenue increases. The issue is that so many of the Republicans in the House are so hell-bent on cutting spending that they’re going to drag the rest of the country with them off the cliff of default. For some ridiculous reason that I have yet to understand, they believe that if the U.S. government doesn’t pay all of it’s bills, but manages to pay some of them, that we aren’t in default.

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It finally looks as though some cracks are forming in the Tea Party’s resistance to agree to raise the debt ceiling. With Mitch McConnell, the senior Republican in the Senate proposing a new plan that would de-couple the debt ceiling and the budget fight, and remarks by both John Boehner and Eric Cantor that sound almost like they agree the limit needs to be raised, the adults may be in the process of taking the wheel back from the children.

As some commentators on the subject began to suspect a while ago, a complete inability to reach a deal on the debt ceiling could easily backfire on the far right members of the GOP. While the talking heads at FOX News, along with some Republican Presidential candidates (most notably Michelle Bachman), continue to insist that the Treasury Secretary could simply pay some of the nation’s bills in the absence of a debt ceiling deal and everything will be fine, the mood is changing. It may be that the the Republicans who were so ready to take the nation’s debt hostage are now dealing with the terrible prospect of having to shoot that hostage.

Republican Senator Lindsay Graham recently remarked that his party had only themselves to blame for the predicament now facing their ranks. Senator McConnell said that if the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised, President Obama would blame the ensuing catastrophe on the Republicans to his benefit in 2012. The important thing to note in that comment is that McConnell is saying that there will be dire consequences – the opposite of what so many of the “Freshman Class” in the House of Representatives believe.

The biggest problem with many of the Tea Party members of Congress is one of ignorance. Not that the individual members are necessarily ignorance in a general sense, but that, having come to Congress with a simple mandate to cut spending, they have little knowledge, experience or grasp of the complex economics that allow the world’s largest economy to continue functioning, much less of how that economy interacts with the global one. I don’t doubt the earnestness of some of these members, but their blindness to the realities of the debt ceiling situation is reason enough to replace them next year with more sensible, worldly types.

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Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of budget talks with Vice President Biden yesterday, probably ending the VP’s attempt at reconciling the debt limit increase debate, at least temporarily. The deadline for raising the debt limit (and forestalling a possible downgrade of the U.S. government’s credit rating) is coming up in August, so it would seem that throwing a temper tantrum now is less than ideal.

The issue, according to Republicans, is that they refuse to raise taxes on anyone at all and won’t vote to raise the debt limit until a deal is reached to trim a dollar-for-dollar amount from government spending against the amount that the debt ceiling is raised. (No one that I know of has yet explained why the amount the debt ceiling is raised is the magic number for cuts – those two numbers seem to be unrelated.)

The Democrats are operating under the assumption, which makes sense to me, that revenues (i.e., taxes) have to increase, at least somewhat, if this country is going to dig itself out of debt. With Cantor bailing on the talks, it looks to a lot of people like he knows he can’t get what he wants, so he’s going to pass the buck to John Boehner, Speaker of the House, to try to make a deal with the President. If that deal includes increased taxes or even closing tax loopholes, then Cantor can escape having to bear any of the blame for raising taxes in a very anti-tax climate. If that truly is the case, it’s exactly the kind of politicking we don’t need right now as a country. Regardless of his true intentions, Cantor’s behavior here is very disappointing.