QUIVERIN' QEVIN GOES ALL IN (UPDATED)

Last Tuesday, Quiverin’ Qevin McQarthy, Speaker in Name Only, didn’t have a debt-ceiling plan or the votes. Now he has a “bill.” It remains to be seen whether he has the votes. And today is the day we find out.

I put “bill” in quotes because this is a non-starter and he knows it. Whatever he passes will never go beyond the nutcase Republican House Caucus. If it manages to do that.

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to begin marking up the “Limit, Save, Grow Act” at 4 p.m. (EDT) today. The top members from the Appropriations, Budget and Ways and Means panels will testify.

The bill proves that House Republicans boxed themselves into a corner with their own supporters. Democrats are evil; thus compromise with them is itself evil. Government is the problem; thus governing is also anathema.

According to Fraternity Freddie Gaetz McCarthy "picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan and helped us convert it into legislative text." He went on to say that "if you held this plan and the plan that the House Freedom Caucus laid out some weeks ago and held them up to a lamp, you would see a lot of alignment."

Citing Gaetz's comment to reporters, Accountable.US argued the GOP's debt ceiling bill is "a MAGA wishlist.”

There is at present serious doubt that Quiverin’ Qevin can get 218 votes to support the bill. Most prominently, ten midwestern Republicans who are opposed to cutting the ethanol subsidy, which is a financial bonanza to farmers in their districts. None of them have said how they will vote.

McCarthy himself put the issue in start terms yesterday in his press gaggle:

“I don’t want to break all expectations. I want you to follow it. I want you to be on the floor. I want the anticipation. I want you to see. I want you to see as the clock goes up. I want you to write stories like I’m teetering, whether I can win or not. The whole world hangs in the balance and then I want you to write a story after it passes with the President sit down and negotiate.”

That was in response to a question about whether he has the votes to pass the spending cuts bill he finally released last Thursday after months of yelling about amorphous “CUTS” and disingenuously tying the debt ceiling to spending

Here is why McCarthy and House Republicans manufactured this fake crisis around the debt ceiling:

They want the attention. They want to be able to claim Democrats are unreasonable and unwilling to negotiate on something they don’t have to negotiate on. He wants the headlines and the fake pressure campaign and the drama. All while risking economic damage around the globe.

The White House and Democrats are on the right side of public opinion. New polling shows that 64 percent of voters believe it would be worse to default on the nation's debt than to raise the debt ceiling, while 36 percent say that raising the ceiling is worse than defaulting. Voters support raising the debt ceiling by a 10-point margin, 48 percent - 38 percent, with 14 percent saying they weren't sure.

When CBS News asked respondents simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, a narrow majority said no, with 46 percent favoring and 54 percent opposed. However, when these people were asked if Congress should raise the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on its current debt, 70 percent support increasing the ceiling.

Unfortunately, some Democrats are beginning to question Biden's categorical refusal to negotiate with McCarthy, seeing it as unsustainable given Republican control of the House. I call this collection of clucks the Professional Hand-wringer’s Caucus. Most of them are “centrists,” who belong to the “Problem solver’s caucus” (better-named the problem maker’ caucus since they have a long history of undermining leadership with their surrender monkey position).

Biden's position from the start has been that Republicans must fulfill their obligation to raise the debt ceiling, which every Congress has done under both GOP and Democratic presidents, before the two sides can negotiate on spending.

Here’s what Biden and Democratic leaders are putting up with:

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.): "I respect the White House position. But not in perpetuity. Because negotiation, that's what this whole institution is about."

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.): "We're going to have to negotiate," adding that Republicans have now presented "something to react to."

No, negotiation is not what “this whole institution” is about, and Republicans have not presented anything to react to.

Once again, I am left in complete agreement with Mark Twain’s description of congress critters made back in 1873: “Consider a congressman; then consider an idiot. Bah! I repeat myself.”

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded to McCarthy’s “proposal” with this: "'Let me kill over 100,000 manufacturing jobs - mostly in red states - or I’ll force America to default on bills we racked up and trigger a recession,' is the opposite of a compelling message."

McCarthy’s “proposal” would raise the federal debt limit for a year, injecting another raise into the middle of the 2024 campaign, while repealing the green energy tax incentives established under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the law’s new solar and wind manufacturing production tax credits.

The “bill” is a legislative wish list of measures with no future in the Senate, where Democratic leaders have joined Biden in refusing to negotiate policy changes as part of the debt ceiling.

The White House responded quickly, declining to defund everything it's done, and telling McCarthy to grow the fuck up. This was his response the same day McCarthy announced his “bill”:

“We’ve never ever defaulted on the debt. It would destroy this economy. And who do you think will hurt the most? You hard-working people, the middle class, the neighborhoods I got raised in - not the superwealthy and the powerful, but working folks. Take default off the table. And let’s have a real serious detailed conversation about how to grow the economy, lower costs and reduce the deficit.”

Republicans will never do that. They are doing this because they know everything they believe in is detested by a majority of Americans and will never pass. They know that without gerrymandered legislatures creating gerrymandered congressional districts, half of them - most prominently all members of the Freedom Caucus - wouldn’t be in office.

McCarthy isn't a good enough politician for this fight. But that doesn’t stop to Hand Wringers from giving him ammunition to believe he can get away with this.

First-term Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), demonstrating both that Twain is right and the old rule that first-termers were seen and not heard while they learned where the bathrooms are in the capitol: “I don’t think there’s any harm in the two of them sitting down to talk. The idea that we’re even coming this close to a potential default is insane.”

Indeed it is, you fucking dumbass. And it’s the fault of that collection of clucks you think you can talk to. The ones who want you and every other Democrat dead.

The whip count on this move by McCarthy is not good. Proof of that is he is not making any serious predictions of victory this afternoon.

The range of GOP factions that make up the conference have competing complaints that will cause heartburn for leadership and can potentially sink the bill altogether.

Conservatives want deeper cuts and stricter language on work requirements for food stamps. George Santos put in an amendment changing the requirement from 20 hours a week to 30. Fraternity Freddie wants the requirements to become law in 2024 rather than the bill’s goal of 2025 (proving Freddie is too stupid to even qualify as alligator bait, since even McCarthy is smart enough to know not to do that in an election year).

Moderates are worried about going on the record for spending cuts that are dead on arrival in the Senate. Some are upset about cuts to green energy tax credits and would oppose stricter food stamp language. “Biden-district” Republicans are surfacing as reliable votes for this “bill” even with Democrats threatening to use it against them next year. They see little downside given that the most controversial provisions will likely end up on the cutting room floor, and they believe the bill's spending cuts are broadly popular. One GOP source said that Democrats attacks against Republicans who voted for Trump's impeachment, the infrastructure bill and the January 6 Commission in the previous congress is driving a belief among vulnerable these representatives that they'll be targeted - by the GOP right or the Democrats - regardless of how they vote. (refer again to Twain’s statement).

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Courtney Rice said "any Republican that votes for this plan can be certain they'll be hearing about it from now until Election Day when they're kicked out of office.’ House Majority Forward is running ads slamming the bill's spending cuts in the New York City media market, where many of the vulnerable Republicans are based.

East Coast representatives representing high-tax states want to leverage the bill to expand the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. (See Twain’s statement)

Midwestern representatives are alarmed over cuts to ethanol and biodiesel subsidies, which could impact on rural districts.

As of now, McCarthy and other leaders don’t intend to change the bill text. CNN reports. Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a McCarthy ally tasked with managing negotiations, said leadership will instead seek to "better explain a few of the text provisions."

This isn’t a “serious bill.” The “bill” wants to “cap” federal expenditures at 2022 levels. Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development warned that roughly 640,000 families would lose rental assistance if its budget was reverted to fiscal year 2022 levels. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, estimated that 1.2 million people would lose access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) under the Republican proposal.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said

"These caps are cuts. They would ensure that resources for critical programs 10 years from now remain below the levels in effect today. That's 10 years of cuts for less than one year of preventing a default."

Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, said the House GOP leadership's proposal is "a reflection of just how totally controlled by the fringes of his caucus McCarthy is. It's just as bad as we expected. Literally take food off the table of millions of families just trying to get by? Help the ultra-wealthy and big corporations get away with cheating on their taxes? Strip away healthcare from children, veterans, and seniors? Saddle millions with crushing student debt? Pull the plug on new clean energy jobs? That's your big pitch to the American people? It'd be funny if it wasn't so serious."

Tonight’s news will be interesting, one way or the other. The House goes out of session tomorrow until May 9, and the best estimate is that the debt ceiling becomes an active problem sometime around June 15.

UPDATE: Well, Quiverin’ Qevin did it. He passed his “bill” 217-215, losing only 4 of the 5 he could afford, and benefiting from the absence of some Democrats that lowered the necessary number for his “victory.”

But what did he”win”? He had to give back the tax breaks on ethanol to get the midwestern votes; he had to make the onerous “work requirements” that would require people on Social Security to work not 20 but 30 hours a week to qualify for food assistance under SNAP, to keep the votes of the Taliban 20. He “won” at passign a bill that is DOA in the Senate and even has Republican opponents there. He “won” at a PR event making the GOP even more the crazy, evil, shitheads the public sees them as. He managed to wrap that “crazy evil shitheads” designation around the “Biden 18”, all of whom have targets on their backs and as a result of this vote are more likely to be single-term congressional representatives than the odds said they were yesterday before the vote.

Does he really think this “victory” gives him something to “negotiate” with President Biden? Such a negotiation would depend on Quiverin’ Qevin possessing a “credible threat.” What made Obama negotiate to his detriment in 2011 was that the House and Senate Republicans were united, and really could have fucked things up royally.

Qevin possesses a “bill” that has no future. It is a “threat” that has no ability to threaten. If Qevin is stupid enough to think this piece of toilet paper is something of value, and manages to let the nutballs push us into default, it will take about a week for him to lose power in the House in the aftermath of the default, and for a debt limit to be passed; one that includes killing the need to ever do this vote again. The country will experience real financial pain, and guess who will be blamed for it? Kevin and his merry band of traitors.

The last time the country was mad enough at Republicans to smack them as hard as they will be smacked for having done this - if it happens - was 1932. And it took 20 years for them to recover sufficiently to elect a popular war hero they weren’t actually sure was one of them as president - and Eisenhower was the only “Republican” who could have won. It took another 30 years after that for the memory of their culpability in creating the Great Depression to fade sufficiently that they could compete head-to-head on ideas and win.

Quiverin’ Qevin won’t be thinking this is such a victory when the economic cataclysm he is playing with gets wrapped around his neck by a politician much smarter than he is, and he and his party are strangled with it.

Careful what you ask for, Qevin, you okiefornian dumbass.

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