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Friday, May 27, 2011

Mitch McConnell's Demand to Yoke Raising the Debt Ceiling to Medicare Cuts Dooms the Republicans to Devastating Defeat

The raising of the debt ceiling has always been equally indispensable to both parties, to the extent that they are parties embedded in an actually-existing government and in an actually-existing national economy which has to be functioning at some level for either party to do any of the things it is there to do.

This is exactly equally true even of the party that has come to be defined by its anti-governmental zealotry: I mean, without government how would the GOP enforce the anti-abortion police state of its daydreams? How would it get all that sweet Department of Defense welfare pork to its favorite evil billionaires?

Nevertheless, the Republican party, now chock full o' wingnuts who rode a wave of righteous but inchoate economic disgruntlement into the House and who have convinced themselves that this means somehow that the American people dream of living in a country that looks a lot like a cross between Atlas Shrugged and The Handmaid's Tale, has been playing a facile game the last few months in which it has tried to get some of the ruinous unpopular things it always wants -- you know, ever more tax cuts for billionaires, looting vital social programs such as Medicare or public education which it has always despised, that sort of the thing, the usual Republican crap sandwiches -- simply by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling even though doing so is quite as indispensable to it as to the party from which it has sought to exact these ugly extras.

This has never made much sense, honestly, as a gambit, inasmuch as it amounts to a kind of confused hostage negotiation in which the hostage taker puts the gun to his own head and thinks this has strengthened his position somehow. I do think that some Democrats have been just policy-wise and politics-foolish enough to fall for this sort of nonsense occasionally in the past, that is, to pointlessly capitulate to some absurd and evil Republican threat for no other reason than that they grasp the magnitude of dire policy consequences that would result from Republicans acting on the threat even if there is little political ground for thinking Republicans could actually do their worst in any case.

But given the dependency of the Republican party on financial interests which would be among those most negatively and immediately impacted by failing to raise the debt ceiling as Republicans are threatening to do, there really has never been a good reason to believe that this threat of theirs is anything but a ridiculous infantile bluff, and it does indeed seem as though Democrats in the main understand this quite well and are acting accordingly for once.

Of course, the key word I used in describing the Republican threat is "infantile," and as the Republicans realize that most Democrats seem disinclined to fall for their little hostage drama this time around they have responded mostly by puffing out their chests and raising the temperature and toxicity of the rhetoric to create the impression that they are being boxed into a corner by their own idiot fervency into doing something even they do not really want to do, so that what has to be a bluff actually might end up not being a bluff after all or something like that.

While it really is true that the Republicans seem to present an unusually crazy cohort this season, even for them, such that all the crazy talk about jumping off the cliff is a bit alarming after all, there remains vanishingly little reason to believe them in earnest about their little suicide pact, given the corporate interests they are in bed with, and so all the bluster really makes the almost inevitable defeat and walk-back in the near future all the more delicious to contemplate, especially as one conjures up in imagination the howling hair-tearing chorus of betrayal and bewilderment sure to follow among the saucer-eyed white-racists and Randroids of their Teabag Base.

All of this provides the context in which we should read today's stakes-raising demand by Mitch McConnell that any agreement to raise the debt ceiling must include Medicare cuts, a move which seems to me the final nail in the coffin for Republicans in this deranged hostage adventure with the debt ceiling.

In the aftermath of their rather stunning defeat in the NY-26 special election (that is to say, their defeat in an extraordinarily Republican-skewed district, a defeat that turned quite palpably on the embrace of the losing Republican of the Medicare-killing Ryan budget and the defense of Medicare by the victorious Democrat), the GOP clearly grasps that their disastrous embrace -- now, thanks to Harry Reid, in both the House and the Senate -- of the Medicare-killing billionaire-taxcut-larding Ryan Budget is looking rather like the Waterloo they once wistfully thought Healthcare Reform was going to be for President Obama during the inglorious Summer of Tea.

By attaching Medicare cuts to any raising of the debt ceiling, Republicans obviously hope to cut their losses in 2012 by making Democrats share in the wearing of Paul Ryan's dirty diaper. While this might seem a bit of cunning opportunism in the moment of its proposal it actually amounts to a sudden switching of all the terms of the hostage drama on the part of the Republicans that exposes the extent to which all of this nonsense about not raising the debt ceiling has never been anything but superficial and opportunistic fun and games from the beginning.

It was reasonable to fancy that at least some Democrats might capitulate to demands for macro-economically illiterate spending cuts demanded by Republicans as the price of raising the debt-ceiling as they were always going to do anyway just out of fear of how awful it would be if somehow they didn't raise it after all and also because there is so much wrongheaded and hypocritical obsession inside the beltway about deficits in general these days (when the crisis is in fact a jobs crisis and the solution is short term stimulus via infrastructure and renewable energy investment to be paid for by the revenues arising from the consequent recovery, and everybody actually knows this but simply isn't acting on it because Republicans make this next to impossible and in any case, when all is said and done, even the people who know better are mostly rich and powerful enough not to be likely to suffer the full brunt of the devastation that comes from not doing anything even when they know what should be done so nothing gets done) that some Democrats might be willing to do some of that kabuki deficit-hawk theater just to have a chance to get on one of the Sunday shows for once despite being a Democrat or something like that.

But now that McConnell has turned on a dime, and changed all the terms of the hostage drama from Republicans holding the gun to their own heads while demanding dumb deficit-hawkery that was never anything more than silly political opportunism to holding the gun to their own heads while demanding Democrats give them a free pass on the one-way ticket to oblivion they purchased with their votes on the Ryan budget which is also nothing more than silly political opportunism but with the difference that the stakes of this new opportunism are far more readily grasped in precisely such opportunistic terms by Democrats, McConnell has revealed the crass and idiotic superficiality of the whole charade from the beginning and in a way that clarifies as never before the benefits to Democrats of not playing along.

None of the underlying fundamentals has changed in the least: raising the debt ceiling remains precisely as equally indispensable to both parties as it ever was, the financial interests to which the Republicans are if anything even more beholden than the Democrats will be among the first to see to it that the debt ceiling is raised and so not doing so has never been anything but a non starter, the ideological handwaving to the contrary has never been anything but theater but has gone far enough along to ensure that the end-game can only hurt Republicans and benefit Democrats with the consequence that Democrats have even less reason to play along.

Now, on top of everything else, Republicans have revealed that they are fully aware of the extent of the mess they are in with their public exposure of their long suppressed hostility as a party to the Medicare beloved by the American people and are now incoherently flailing about, yoking one foolish disaster (the never anything but absurd Republican debt-ceiling hostage drama) to another foolish disaster (the never anything but suicidal Republican hostility to Medicare).

In the moment, from the vantage at the bottom of the deep hole they have dug for themselves, Republicans seem to fancy that this effort to kill two birds with one stone is some kind of genius move, but it actually manages to expose to an ever more glaring blaze of light the extent to which Democrats are holding the winning hand here, hence bolstering in ways they rarely manage to do for themselves their always too-weak resolve to do what has always obviously been the right thing to do here in any case.

No, it is unlikely that even today's Democratic Party will negotiate with hostage-takers holding a gun to their own heads, especially when the clowns holding the gun change their tactics at the last moment and offer not only to stop holding the gun to their own heads if we do what they demand as if anybody believes they really mean to pull the trigger, but to do what they demand in exchange for literally accepting the gun from their hands, holding it to our own heads, and pulling the trigger ourselves.

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