Debt Limit Charade Redux: The Humiliation of the Moderates

David Super

     As derisive as my post of yesterday was about the courage of GOP moderates, events showed that I actually gave them too much credit.  The quick and humiliating capitulation of the few Members posturing as GOP moderates confirms that there is no path to a negotiated solution to the debt limit problem and puts the ball squarely in President Biden’s court.

     After describing concessions the Republican leadership made to the corn industry and its far-right, I predicted that “[l]ikely more [tweaks] are to come.”  I did so because House GOP moderates had been circulating a (very) short list for over a week of changes they were insisting that the leadership make in the bill to secure their votes. 

     These changes would have eliminated neither the unseriousness of the bill nor its fundamental cruelty.  They would not have alleviated the recklessness of its repeal (with very small transition provisions for the corn industry) of the Inflation Reduction Act’s efforts to combat climate change.  And they would not have altered the provision that would gut Internal Revenue Service funding for pursuing affluent tax cheats, a move the Congressional Budget Office estimates would increase the deficit by $120 billion over ten years. 

     The moderates’ only demands were the removal of a (very) few of the most sensationally cruel sections of the bill, sections that contributed very modestly to the bill’s estimated deficit-reducing effects.  Indeed, had the leadership removed the sections to which the moderates objected and also the reduction in IRS funding, the bill’s estimated bottom line would have been essentially unchanged. 

     I did not think the moderates would get their full list, even as modest as it was, but I assumed they would get something, even something merely cosmetic.  I was wrong.  The leadership ordered them to vote for a final bill that was somewhat worse than the one to which they had objected on the issues they were raising. 

     And every single one of the so-called moderates went along.  The four negative GOP votes were all from the far-right Freedom Caucus:  Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, etc.  The moderates abased themselves completely.  And because they were widely known to be holding out for changes, the fact that they got absolutely none shows everyone how complete the leadership’s contempt for them is – and how wholly lacking in backbone they are. 

     When moderate Democrats have resisted legislation in the House or Senate of previous Democratic-controlled Congresses, Democratic leaders almost invariably offered them some concessions, albeit often less than the holdouts desired.  Senate Republican Leader McConnell operates similarly, as did former Republican House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan. 

     This complete, public humiliation of the so-called House Republican moderates demonstrates the far-right’s utter domination of that caucus.  It also is a further humiliation of Speaker McCarthy, who presumably requested but was denied permission to offer the moderates some fig-leaf.  And the so-called moderates’ meek acceptance of their humiliation confirms that they believe the threat of primaries from the far right precludes any assertiveness whatsoever. 

     Just as some kept holding out hope in January that the moderates would band together with the Democrats to elect one of their own as speaker, some now imagine that the House Republican moderates will join with Democrats to sign a discharge petition to bring a clean debt limit fix to the House floor and avert a fiscal high-noon.  This episode demonstrates that the House leadership does not regard that as a sufficiently plausible possibility to afford those moderates even a modicum of respect. 

     Whether or not the U.S. defaults on its debt now depends entirely on whether Joe Biden is willing to adopt either a technical solution (such as authorizing the minting of a platinum coin with a high enough denomination to allow the Treasury to pay the country’s bills under 31 U.S.C. 5112(k)) or to declare the debt limit unconstitutional under Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment.  There will be, and can be, no negotiated settlement with this House Republican Party. 

     By the way, for those keeping score at home, we are now almost two weeks past the statutory deadline for House and Senate concurrence on this year’s Congressional Budget Resolution.  If the House GOP was, as Speaker McCarthy repeatedly insists, determined to bring our nation’s fiscal house into order, one would expect at a minimum that it would introduce, report out, and pass a budget resolution as required by law.  It will not do so, of course, because that would require it to add at least some specificity about where it would make the one-third reduction in appropriations for programs other than defense and veterans’ health care.  And that would either anger those who want a federal government that continues to function or expose the GOP’s supposed budget cuts for the unserious fraud that they are.

     @DavidASuper1