If you’re suffering from a severe bout of déjà vu, you’re not the only one. It seems like only two years ago, the White House and Congress were locked in an apocalyptic bit of brinkmanship over the debt ceiling. Oh, wait, that was only two years ago. And what lessons did everyone learn?
The Republicans may occasionally tend toward evil, but at least they’re (sometimes, and I assume unintentionally) honest: Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters in 2011 the lesson the GOP learned from the first showdown over the debt ceiling was that, while some nervous nellies in the Republican caucus worried that maybe there were some risks associated with ransoming the fiscal credibility of the world’s financial hegemon, it turned out the debt ceiling was “a hostage that’s worth ransoming” if your party has bordeline psychotic demands and you’ve got no other leverage.
What did Obama learn? Well, having been played for a sucker on the debt ceiling, and then played for a sucker again on the “fiscal cliff,” the president seems unwilling to make the same mistake a third time. Since the Republicans are in effect demanding that Obama agree to dismantle all the accomplishments of his first term in exchange for nothing, the Democratic counteroffer to the Republicans is just that: nothing. The GOP can pass a clean extension of the debt ceiling without any ludicrous demands, or the government shuts down.
The last few weeks have been a pretty staggering demonstration of the most important political fact of the last five years: While Barack Obama has arguably led or presided over a move among Democrats slightly to the left of the status quo at the end of the Bill Clinton years, the Republican Party has gone totally, incoherently mad. George W. Bush’s immigration policies are now too far left for the mainstream GOP. John McCain’s hawkish war-lust is simultaneously insufficiently isolationist and insufficiently Muslim-hating for the Tea Party Caucus. Last year, Jeb Bush told Republicans that Saint Ronald himself wouldn’t have fit in with the modern Party of Lincoln.
If America were a small, insignificant country, this would all be a somewhat interesting sideshow—hey, Belgium spent almost 600 days without a formal government at one point. But watching the largest economy on Earth be repeatedly hijacked by madmen with grudges should scare all of us. Or maybe the relevance to the budget of denying women birth control is obvious to everyone but me.
Even for someone with a sarcastic bent, it’s hard to reductio ad absurdam this without unwittingly ripping something from the headlines, like the California Republican who railed against food stamps while pocketing $5.1 million in farm subsidies. I mean, if I told you ten years ago that the President of the United States would have a better week negotiating with Iran than with the US House of Representatives, would you have believed it?
The US government will legally be unable to borrow new money by Tuesday. This is absurd—no other major country has a legal debt ceiling—and yet it’s true. In normal times it would be a simple matter to pass a law and fix it. But these aren’t normal times. It’s 2013, and you go to the bond markets with the Republican Party you have, not the one you want.
