Bipartisanship In Washington Means A Conservative Consensus Fueled By Corporate Money

Yesterday, Politico reported that "somehow, both McCarthy and Biden emerged from the potential economic debacle in better political shape. Politics is often zero sum, but the FRA accomplished the chief political goals of both men:

• McCarthy, who faced a humiliating path to the speakership, needed to strengthen his position within the House GOP conference.

• Biden, whose job approval trendline has veered uncomfortably close to sinking below 40%, needed to strengthen his position with American voters."

McCarthy managed to tame some of his loudest and most problematic right-wingers. He did it by splitting their ranks— for every Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) accusing him of stabbing conservatism in the back, there was a Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) sticking up for the deal. It helped immensely that two prominent hard-liners he’d given positions of prominence— Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rules Committee member Thomas Massie(R-KY)— had his back.

This is an old story and a sign of democracy working, even if it doesn’t look pretty: When the fringiest members of a party are brought into the fold and given power and responsibility, they (sometimes) learn to behave more responsibly. McCarthy has for now defused the threat of an outright right-wing rebellion and he has rebutted the popular caricature of House Republicans as extremists unable to do the basics of governing. (And, yes, we get that simply avoiding a default is a low bar.)

As for Biden, we’ll see if his polling recovers as a result of this deal, but last night’s Oval Office address was designed to milk it for all it’s worth. There are a lot of Democrats still unhappy that the White House even entered into this negotiation, and it seems obvious they are correct that going forward the debt ceiling will be an even more tempting tool to wield against a president when there’s divided government.

But for Biden, that’s a problem for another day. For now he gets to hold up the FRA as a shining example of his two favorite, sometimes contradictory, re-election themes: he’s a bipartisan president working with Republicans and the only thing protecting voters from the GOP’s extremism.

Dan Balz is all for the conservative bipartisanship that saved us from the terrors of default but he abhors the threat. Of course without the threat, Biden could never have gotten the Democrats in Congress— including staunch progressive members like Ilhan Omar (MN), David Cicilline (RI), Mark Takano (CA), Chris Deluzio (PA), Ted Lieu (CA), Jill Tokuda (HI), Matt Cartwright (PA), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ), Becca Balint (VT), Brian Schatz (HI), Sherrod Brown (OH), Peter Welch (VT), Tina Smith (MN), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Mazie Hirono (HI), Raphael Warnock (GA) and poseurs like Maxwell Frost (FL), Robert Garcia (CA), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Cory Booker (NJ), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Alex Padilla (CA) and Jon Ossoff (GA) who voted in favor of the turd sandwich— to accept what the Republicans were demanding.

“The final product,” Balz wrote, “was not exactly splitting the difference, but more a recognition of the red lines on each side and how not to trample them. Biden can claim that he protected vital programs and priorities from deeper cuts. McCarthy can claim he forced Biden to give ground on spending and on other policy points… So two cheers for bipartisanship. But no one should get carried away. Republicans manufactured a crisis by using the danger of default and the damage that could have been done to the economy to demand what they could not have gotten otherwise. They insisted on concessions from the Democrats simply to do what previous Congresses have done repeatedly, which is authorize payment for past spending by giving the government more power to borrow money. The debt ceiling has nothing to do with future spending, only with what previous Congresses have already spent or authorized to spend. Republicans knew the only leverage they had was to tie it to something with a deadline. As in the past, when Congress has faced a hard deadline, things usually get done. This time around, however, it was not a foregone conclusion because of questions about McCarthy and his ability to keep his members in line. ‘It was an engineered crisis, given Republicans’ demand that Democrats pay a ransom to secure an increase in the debt ceiling,’ Sarah Binder of George Washington University and the Brookings Institution said.”

Yesterday, Jim Tanksersley gave the White side of the story, how the fine print I the agreement shows Biden “won,” not mentioning that the country lost. “In pursuit of an agreement,” he wrote, “the Biden team was willing to give Republicans victory after victory on political talking points, which they realized McCarthy needed to sell the bill to his conference. They let McCarthy’s team claim in the end that the deal included deep spending cuts, huge clawbacks of unspent federal coronavirus relief money and stringent work requirements for recipients of federal aid. But in the details of the text and the many side deals that accompanied it, the Biden team wanted to win on substance. With one large exception— a $20 billion cut in enforcement funding for the Internal Revenue Service— they believe they did. The way administration officials see it, the full final agreement’s spending cuts are nothing worse than they would have expected in regular appropriations bills passed by a divided Congress. They agreed to structure the cuts so they appeared to save $1.5 trillion over a decade in the eyes of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But thanks to the side deals— including some accounting tricks— White House officials estimate that the actual cuts could total as little as $136 billion over the two enforceable years of the spending caps that are central to the agreement.”

At one point in the talks, administration officials offered to include in the deal more than 100 relief programs from which they were willing to rescind money. The final list spanned 20 pages of a 99-page bill, and McCarthy championed it on the House floor. But because much of the money was repurposed for other spending, the net savings added up to only about $11 billion over two years. One of the programs had a remaining balance of just $40.

Many Democrats remain furious that the deal included new work requirements that could push 750,000 people off food stamps, which the Biden team begrudgingly concluded it had to accept.

That measure alone could have tanked Democratic support for the deal in Congress, officials knew. So they sought to counterbalance it with efforts to expand food stamp eligibility for veterans, the homeless and others, which Republicans agreed to do. The budget office concluded that the changes would actually add recipients to the program, on net.

Some Democrats and progressive groups have sharply criticized Biden for negotiating over the debt limit at all, denouncing the spending cuts and work requirements and saying he cemented Republicans’ ability to ransom the borrowing limit whenever a Democrat occupies the White House.

… The president appeared to score wins before the talks even started. He goaded Republicans into agreeing, in the midst of his State of the Union address, that Social Security and Medicare would be off limits in the talks— thanks to a spontaneous riff that grew out of a passage in his speech that he had worked on extensively in the days beforehand. He proposed a budget filled with tax increases on the rich and corporations that were meant to reduce debt, but he refused to engage McCarthy in serious talks until Republicans offered a spending plan of their own.