The Federal government’s debt ceiling looms. If not raised by August 2, we will default on our obligations for the first time in history. Bond raters Moody’s and S&P warn of a downgrade in our credit. Fed chairman Bernanke warns of chaos and catastrophe. Gold has hit a new high. There’s little doubt that if we default, the world economy will fall off a cliff.
How did we get here? Washington may still skin by with an agreement – but the negotiations over the debt between the White House and its opponents on Capitol Hill already show, depressingly, the utter bankruptcy of our politics.
Last week, President Obama asked both Republicans and Democrats to go long: craft a proposal that would lower spending and raise revenue (at a 3-to-1 ratio) to lower the deficit by $4 trillion over a decade. Whatever his motivations – and with Obama it’s usually a mix of policy and crafty politics – Obama offer an historic “eat our peas” moment.
The reaction was telling. On the left, MoveOn.org screamed that Obama was taking too much from widows and orphans to let fat cats get away with murder, again. On the right, GOP jihadists said raising taxes by one dime would kill jobs forever.
Then the weaseling began. Having backed themselves into a corner, the GOP has started looking for a way out that wouldn’t make their dead-enders bolt.
Nothing makes this plainer than Senator Mitch McConnell’s latest proposal. The Senate minority leader fled real leadership and embraced everything people hate about Washington.
McConnell’s proposal avoids default by authorizing the president to raise the limit three more times before the 2012 election, with three opportunities for the GOP to disapprove in a toothless vote. This, he muses openly, will help Republicans defeat Obama and take the Senate, giving them complete ownership of government. But is it ownership he deserves?
“[If we allow default, Obama] will say Republicans are making the economy worse,” McConnell said in an interview with the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham . “It is an argument that he could have a good chance of winning, and all of the sudden we have co-ownership of the economy. That is a very bad position going into the election.”(source for this and following quotes: NYTimes 7.14.2011)
Imagine: the man who desires to be Senate majority leader in 2013 looks in horror at taking co-ownership of the economy. The man who voted all through the Bush years for unfunded wars, unfunded prescription mandates, and pork-barrel projects in Kentucky declines co-ownership of the nation’s economic problems – problems he spent decades creating.
Other Republican heroes agree: “I strongly support Senator McConnell’s efforts to avoid a default on our nation’s debt, and the last-case emergency proposal he outlined yesterday to ensure that Republicans aren’t unduly blamed for failure to raise the debt ceiling,” said Senator John McCain.
Only very conservative GOP Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina seems willing to say what everyone knows. “How many Republicans have been on TV saying, ‘I am not going to raise the debt limit,’ ” said Graham, including himself in the mix of those who did so. “We have no one to blame but ourselves.”
Graham’s honesty will be rewarded by a GOP challenger in the next election – someone well to the right of Attila the Hun. It will be interesting to see how much support he gets from McConnell.
If this is the GOP’s idea of leadership, McConnell might as well go home and let Rush Limbaugh run the country.
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