Playing chicken in the kabuki pageant

Playing chicken in the kabuki pageant

by digby

So the Republicans are making it clearer than ever that they have every intention of playing chicken until 2012:

A whole host of Republican lawmakers are now angling to use the debt ceiling as leverage to enact severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other saftey net programs. Today on Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised his entire caucus would vote against raisin the debt ceiling unless the White House agrees to cut entitlements.
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If there is any question about Senate Republicans’ intentions, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (R-TX) swiftly put it to bed. The “debt ceiling vote is ultimate leverage to get fiscal reform,” he tweeted yesterday.

I suppose we should prepare ourselves for the administration and the Democrats to “meet them half way” but we already know that’s kabuki:

So, where do we stand? There’s one bit of good news, which the Democrats, if they actually wanted to stop this austerity trainwreck, could use to great advantage in the upcoming “negotiations”:

At the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, “Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) delivered a stern message that the debt ceiling will eventually have to be raised to keep the government from defaulting. But he also promised that Republicans will ‘use the leverage’ they have to enact at least some of their spending-reduction goals. ‘It’s a leverage moment for Republicans,’ Cantor said in an interview Friday. ‘The president needs us. There are things we were elected to do. Let’s accomplish those if the president needs us to clean up the old mess.'”

I wonder what “old mess” he’s talking about — the mess the Republicans made in their eight years of useless wars and tax cuts or the old mess of “entitlement spending”? But that’s beside the point: Cantor just said that they will have to raise the debt ceiling. He said it out loud and on the record. Therefore, we now know that any capitulation made by the President and the Democrats in the negotiations will be made because they wanted to make them. There can be no doubt about that.

This doesn’t give me confidence that the Dems haven’t joined the dance:

President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Austin Goolsbee said, “If we get to the point where you’ve damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.” But, as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benan notes, Senate Republicans insists on the position of “do what I want,” or “I’ll cause catastrophe on purpose.”

If you give them this power, they will use it. They use this “I’m a crazy lunatic, you can’t stop me” routine all the time. It might be better if the Democrats channel Nancy Reagan and just say no.

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