Ultimately, The Public Will Blame Biden, Not McCarthy, For The Turd Sandwich

Yesterday, I asked a friend with whom I'm planning a holiday in India, if she thinks we should rent a house in Delhi or stay in a hotel and sent her pictures of 2 really beautiful houses to look at. She has already seen the hotel that I’ve been talking to. This is the e-mail she sent me this morning. Do you have friends like this too? She’s a red diaper baby:

I’m betting she was reacting to the Peter Baker column in the NY Times, In Pursuit of Consensus, Did Biden Find the Reasonable Middle or Give Away Too Much? Spoiler: “The deal to raise the debt ceiling bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is committed to bipartisanship, but it comes at the cost of rankling many in his own party.” The White House is boasting— via Baker in this case— that the deal “to raise the debt ceiling while constraining federal spending bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is the one figure who can still do bipartisanship in a profoundly partisan era… Biden believes in his bones in reaching across the aisle even at the expense of some of his own priorities.” [If they are his priorities, which I have doubted since the 1970s there ver were.] Baker does note that many Democrats think Biden “cannot stop himself from giving away too much in an eternal and ephemeral quest for consensus.” It’s a conservative deal and will be backed by cones native Democrats— not progressives— and by conservative Republicans— not fascists or hyper-partisan MAGAts.

Like my friend, “many on the political left are aggravated that Biden in their view gave into McCarthy’s hostage-taking strategy. The president who said the debt ceiling was ‘not negotiable’ ended up negotiating it after all to avoid a national default, barely even bothering with the fiction that talks over spending limits were somehow separate. Liberals were pushing Biden to stiff the Republicans and short-circuit the debt ceiling altogether by claiming the power to ignore it under the 14th Amendment, which says the ‘validity of the public debt’ of the federal government ‘shall not be questioned.’ But while Biden [said he] agreed with the constitutional interpretation, he concluded it was too risky because the nation could still go into default while the issue was being litigated in the courts. And so, much to the chagrin of his allies, the bargaining of recent weeks was entirely on Republican terms. While details were still emerging this weekend, the final agreement included no new Biden fiscal initiatives like higher taxes on the wealthy or expanded discounts for insulin. The question essentially was how much of the Limit, Save and Grow Act passed by House Republicans last month would the president accept in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling.”

Because McCarthy is as weak and as politically risk-adverse as Biden, the White House “succeeded in stripping the Limit, Save and Grow Act significantly down from what it originally was, to the great consternation of [MAGAts and fascists]. Instead of raising the debt ceiling for less than one year while imposing hard caps on discretionary spending for 10 years, the agreement links the two so that the spending limits last just two years, the same as the debt ceiling increase. While Republicans insisted on predicating the limits on a baseline of 2022 spending levels, appropriations adjustments will make it effectively equivalent to the more favorable baseline of 2023. As a result, the agreement will pare back anticipated spending over the decade just a fraction of what the Republicans sought. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the caps passed by House Republicans last month would have trimmed $3.2 trillion in discretionary spending over 10 years; a rough New York Times calculation suggests the agreement reached by Biden and McCarthy might instead cut a third of that or less. Moreover, while Biden did not advance [m]any new Democratic policy goals in the agreement with McCarthy, he effectively shielded the bulk of his accomplishments from the first two years of his presidency from Republican efforts to gut them.”

The Republican plan envisioned revoking many of the clean energy incentives that Biden included in the Inflation Reduction Act, eliminating additional funds for the Internal Revenue Service to chase wealthy tax cheats and blocking the president’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student loans for millions of Americans. None of that was in the final package.

Indeed, the IRS provision offers an example of Biden’s deal-making. As a concession to Republicans, he agreed to cut around $10 billion a year for two years from the additional $80 billion previously allocated to the agency over the next decade, but most of that money will be used to avoid deeper cuts in discretionary spending sought by Republicans.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Richard Rubin noted that “The Internal Revenue Service will lose up to $21.4 billion from its $80 billion expansion fund as part of the bipartisan debt-limit deal, as Republicans got President Biden to pare back one of his top accomplishments. The IRS received the $80 billion last year as part of broader legislation that passed without any Republican votes. The pile of cash was aimed at boosting tax enforcement, revamping aging technology and reversing a decade of attrition at the tax agency.” Giving in to this core GOP demand for their real base, will significantly increase the deficit, not decrease it, since it will allow millionaire and billionaire tax cheats to continue avoiding paying taxes with impunity. Biden’s half-assed “attempt” to close loopholes were ignored by… everyone, including Biden himself.

Yesterday, despite over a dozen Republicans denouncing the deal,threatening to vote against it and removing McCarthy as speaker, McCarthy and his team are claiming they have the votes to pass it. They don’t… at least not without Democratic votes. If it fails— unlikely— Biden will be forced invoke the 14th Amendment. Over the weekend U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns in Boston postponed (indefinitely) a hearing scheduled for today in a lawsuit that a government workers’ union filed in a bid to confirm President Joe Biden’s authority to ignore the debt limit by invoking the 14th Amendment. The White House encouraged the judge’s action.

So what was the point of this whole turd sandwich that Biden and McCarthy put everyone through? Noah Smith called it “a return to the pointless obstructionism and grandstanding that characterized politics in the 2010s. There was absolutely zero reason for the House GOP leadership to use the debt ceiling— they could have just forced a deal through the normal appropriations process. Few people actually believed that the country’s leaders would let the U.S. default on its sovereign debt due to a random minor budget fight…so the net effect of using this tactic seems to have been to make the U.S. look like a dysfunctional clown show in front of our allies, at a time when we need to be projecting an image of dependability.”

Announcing yesterday that he wouldn't be voting for the McCarthy-Biden compromise-- "no deal"-- Freedom Caucus chair Scott Perry (R-PA) reworked this graphic below that they had released last week before the deal was announced. By last night, these were the confirmed Republican NO votes; there will likely be more by the time they vote:

• Andy Biggs (AZ)

• Dan Bishop NC)

• Lauren Boebert (CO)

• Josh Brecheen (OK)

• Vern Buchanan (FL)

• Ken Buck (CO)

• Tim Burchett (TN)

• Eric Burlison (MO)

• Kat Cammack (FL)

• Michael Cloud (TX)

• Andrew Clyde (GA)

• Mike Collins (GA)

• Eli Crane (AZ)

• Byron Donalds (FL)

• Russell Fry (SC)

• Matt Gaetz (FL)

• Bob Good (VA)

• Harriet Hageman (WY)

• Diana Harshbarger (TN)

• Clay Higgins (LA)

• Wesley Hunt (TX)

• Ana Paulina Luna (FL)

• Nancy Mace (SC)

• Mary Miller (IL)

• Cory Mills (FL)

• Ralph Norman (SC)

• Scott Perry (PA)

• Matt Rosendale (MT)

• Chip Roy (TX)

• Keith Self (TX)

• William Timmons (SC)

• Mike Waltz (FL)

The corporate New Dems and Blue Dogs will more than make up for the Republican defections.