Back in January, I wrote this:
Democrats are supremely confident that the Republicans will be blamed for the standoff and that this will benefit them in the 2024 election. In fact, many of them didn’t even try to convince Sinemanchin to raise it in the lame duck because they are so sure that everything will turn out all right and the GOP will be blamed for any fallout from the hostage taking.
Democratic leaders have signaled that they don’t intend to address the borrowing limit in the current lame-duck session of Congress, when their majorities in the House and the Senate would theoretically give them a shot at raising or even eliminating the cap entirely without the help of Republican votes.
Democrats also seem to have convinced themselves that should the issue come to a head in early 2023, pushing the nation once again to the brink of a default and economic crisis, Republicans will take the blame.
“Although there is grave risk to the economy, the gun is in Republicans’ hands,” a Biden adviser told Politico last week. “And there is little question as to who will get blamed for this.”
I got the sense from the beginning that there were some Democrats who actually relished this mayhem because they believed the Republicans would be blamed. As if rattling the markets and possibly crashing the world economy would redound to their benefit if the GOP got blamed for it.
I speculated at the time that there might have been another motive:
[W]hat this suggests is that some Democrats (I’m looking at you Chris Coons) actually wanted this stand-off so they could justify cutting spending. They had to know that they would end up at the negotiating table and if past is prologue, the GOP may pay a political price, but the American people will pay a price too. The last time we barely escaped without cuts to Medicare and Social Security — which the White House endorsed! Luckily the nutcases refused to take yes for an answer and wanted even more. Let’s just see if this ends up on the menu again.
It doesn’t appear that they are making a big play for Social Security and Medicare this time at least not yet. But if they get all the rest you can be sure they’ll come back looking for that too. If you give them an inch they’ll take a hundred miles. This is how they “negotiate:
Over the weekend, Republicans rejected a new White House offer to basically freeze domestic spending at 2023 levels — a demand they have been yelling about for months. But not only did they reject the proposal, they also added new fresh ideas to their hostage ransom list — including work requirements that are more rigid than the ones they originally proposed and new provisions that they did not have in the debt ceiling bill they passed last month.
Will the American people know about that? Somehow I doubt more than a handful are following this closely and instead are hearing the media yammer on about how “both sides” are to blame and they need to stop posturing and “come together.”
The “Gopers will get the blame” strategy was as fatuous as it gets. It assumed that this would be a re-run of 2013 (which they forget was extremely fraught for many months even though the GOP capitulated in the end.) I guess they forgot that the Dems lost the elections in 2014 and 2016.