It’s not pretty
Most congressional Republicans seem to have shrugged off Donald Trump’s wildly irresponsible suggestion, at Wednesday night’s CNN town hall, that a U.S. debt default would be an acceptable (if not desirable) outcome of the fraught negotiations underway between Kevin McCarthy and the White House. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s comments won’t have an impact.
House GOP leaders continue to pretend that it’s Biden and his Democrats who are risking a default and the baleful economic consequences…
But congressional Republicans varied in how annoyed they sounded in brushing off Trump’s “political advice” (as his close Senate ally J.D. Vance chose to put it). Even some House Freedom Caucus members were clearly irritated, according to Axios:
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) suggested Trump’s comments aren’t having a major impact on how Republican lawmakers approach the debt ceiling, noting that the ex-president is “on the periphery of these things …”
“We’re not going to default on anything,” Higgins added.
Here’s the problem: With McCarthy white-knuckling it over his narrow control of the House (his own debt-limit/spending-cut proposal only passed by two votes), it wouldn’t take much of a rebellion by hard-core HFC types to blow up his negotiating position and/or to threaten his slippery grip on the Speaker’s gavel. And Axios did find some echoes of Trump’s position in the House:
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) leapt to Trump’s defense, telling Axios that “if we enter a default situation, it might actually help us clarify some of our spending problems because a future default, if we don’t get our spending in order, is going to be much worse.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-N.C.) said “everything is on the table” as leverage, adding, “Either they agree to cuts, which are modest, or they take responsibility for whatever happens.”
“I agree with [Trump],” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told Axios.
It’s unclear whether Trump’s inflammatory comments on the debt situation were a one-off outrage designed to please his howling audience of fans at the CNN event, or a theme he intends to hit regularly as his buddy Kevin McCarthy struggles to get through the crisis without tanking the economy or his own Speakership. If the 45th president isn’t done with trying to blow up the economy that the 46th president is trying to manage, it could get very scary in Washington very soon.
If things go as they have in the past, Biden will offer to compromise something his base cares deeply about, angering his own voters. Meanwhile the establishment Republicans will be thrilled to take the deal but the lunatics won’t budge preferring to blow up the world unless Biden crawls to them on his belly like a reptile and offers to roll back every legislative achievement and thank them for the opportunity. Then we are back to square one.
What that likely means is that either Kevin McCarthy will let the country default or he will put some kind of deal or a clean debt ceiling hike on the floor that will pass with bipartisan votes. If it’s the latter, one of the nuts will put forth a motion to vacate the chair and he will probably be gone.
If you look back at the tortured debates over this in 2011 and 2013 you’ll see that the Freedom Caucus (formerly known as the Tea Party) will drag this out, possibly shut down the government, put the US credit rating at risk and even possibly default. It’s what they do. They are even more crazy than they used to be (as if that’s possible) so this could easily hurtle out of control. But in 2013, Obama refused to negotiate with them over the debt ceiling, saying that the cuts that had gone through in the “sequester” from 2011 were enough of a compromise.
It took months and months of wrangling, extending the debt ceiling in small increments before they finally passed a clean bill in 2014. It was widely considered to be a loss for Republicans but I’m not sure why. They won the presidency and both houses in 2016. Approval ratings don’t mean much if they win elections in spite of them.
So fasten your seat belt, this is going to be a bumpy ride. The House Republicans are all batshit crazy. The best hope we have is that the Senate passes a clean debt ceiling and Kevin McCarthy can’t stomach a default so he lets it be raised on a bipartisan basis with just a handful of Republican votes — dooming his speakership. How likely is that?