If you want to be optimistic about the progress of debt-limit negotiations, you’re going to have to find it somewhere in this mess:
No. 1: Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell met on Tuesday. Biden reported that “the speaker had issues.” No progress was made, but the staffs were to meet and the principles were to meet on Friday.
No. 2: White House and congressional leadership aides did meet this week to discuss whether there’s any common ground for negotiations. There’s been no progress.
No. 3: Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were supposed to will meet again with President Joe Biden on Friday, but set the meeting back due to lack of staff progress..
If you want to be realistic about the progress of debt-limit negotiations, here’s what’s going on.
No. 1: Biden and the four party leaders made practically no progress in their White House meeting. The tenor of the meeting was at times quite testy. McCarthy read aloud old quotes from Democrats in 2011, including Biden and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the need to negotiate around the debt limit. Biden, in turn, asked McCarthy why House Republicans’ Limit, Save and Grow Act — which extended the debt limit by $1.5 trillion while slashing agency outlays — cut veterans funding by 22%. McCarthy then told the president that was a lie. That exchange stunned some in the room. When McCarthy asked questions of Biden and Schumer interjected with an answer instead, the speaker said he wanted to hear answers from the president. McCarthy asked Schumer why he was refusing to pass a clean debt limit if that’s what Democrats wanted. Schumer told him that debt limits were always bipartisan. Biden later said that “three of the four participants” were “measured.” “Occasionally there would be a little bit of … an assertion that maybe was a little over the top from the speaker.”McConnell, who some Democrats saw as a potential savior, sat mostly quiet. However, McConnell reiterated that he believed a solution needed to be worked out by McCarthy and Biden. McConnell had the same line for reporters later.
No. 2: The Hill staffers and Biden administration officials aren’t even on the same page when it comes to what they’re discussing. Democrats believe they’re negotiating a spending agreement outside the context of the debt limit. Republicans believe they’re negotiating a debt-limit deal with a spending-cut component.
No. 3: Biden has publicly flirted twice with invoking the 14th Amendment to lift the borrowing cap, but appears stuck on the worry that doing so would involve extended legal proceedings that would be as bad for the markets as default.
If you’re assessing the situation right now at the end of this week, you have to be pretty bearish about the prospects of coming to an agreement by June 1. One source involved in the discussions said Biden and the Big Four can’t afford many more days like Tuesday if they want to reach an agreement in a timely manner.
The question is who will blink first and when will that happen. McCarthy said Tuesday that if the two sides are to solve this by June 1, they need an agreement in principle by early next week. As of right now, that doesn’t look like it’s happening.
All the talk by pundits that “of course” they can “kick the can” to September with a short-term increase is just that - talk. McCarthy is firmly ruling out a short-term debt-limit increase and seems pretty steadfast in his conviction that he won’t put a stopgap measure on the floor. Schumer and Jeffries have also pushed back against a short-term hike.
After the meeting President Biden said that while he’s “considering the 14th amendment.” he’s wary because of the length of time the issue would take to litigate. He seemed to suggest that process would be too lengthy to resolve the current standoff.
This answer is not only wrong and self-defeating it demonstrates the White House simply isn’t in shape for this fight. It suggests an attitude toward the courts and the broader political context that is hopelessly stuck in the past.
We can treat it as settled fact that the six Republican Supreme Court justices will look for every opportunity to stymie and politically harm a Democratic president.
The question is how much they’ll upend existing law to do it. In most cases, the answer is a lot.
But there are still limits, at least for some of them.
The debt limit standoff is distinctly different inasmuch as the repercussions of the Court shooting down an administration action on the issue are vast and immediate and cut across normal party lines.
Tanking the economy hits everyone, even if it’s a political reverse for the Democratic President.
Using the 14th Amendment has to operate from the assumption that President will take the step and essentially dare the Supreme Court to stop him, and that they’ll decline to do so.
They might turn down a lawsuit against his action on the merits pretty qucikly. They could sidestep the whole thing by finding it non-justiciable.
They could allow the action to continue while it’s being litigated on some normal schedule. But that’s not really workable since it would amount to continuing to issue debt while the Court decides whether those new debt issues are legal.
What it all comes down to is that there’s no time to litigate it if the 14th Amendment is invoked. And that’s precisely the point. Continue to raise revenue with bonds – as the Congress intended when it passed the budget – and let the Supreme Court decide whether it wants to step in and delay everyone’s Social Security checks or whatever else isn’t going to get paid.
Is the Supreme Court ready to take on that responsibility? We’ll see.
If the belief is that it’s left to the Court to decide whether to slow roll the question for months or more and you decide not to act in advance then you’re just making yourself a chump. They have surrendered in advance.
We have the problem that President Biden is a man of political tradition. That fifty years of playing the game by the system’s rules, “going along to get along,” creates an inertia when it comes to new thinking about existing problems.
We do know that when the issue is big enough, Biden can change his mind, as witness in the major actions he took successfully to meet the threats of the first two years of the administration.
He’s going to have to go further this time, in the face of the biggest crisis that’s come along since he entered the White House. Crashing the world economy in a fit of right wing pique is not an option. Allowing that to happen is to remove the United States from world affairs as a serious country.
The history of the last two debt crises is of no use here. There can be no negotiation with terrorists. Things are not going to “work themselves out” and listening to morons like Peter Baker say that it will happen because it has to happen is to listen to the 1940 French General Staff tell us that Blitzkrieg cannot work.
The hostage takers are dead-set on shooting the hostage. They want to do it.
That is reality in 18 days.
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These Republicans are batsh*t crazy. Do they really think that tanking the US economy and the world's economy also will be the fault of Joe Biden? We all see what they are doing just like we saw that mob riot at the Capital. The hurt to families and individuals will be astronomical. But of course, Mitch McConnell made the 2008 recession last extra long because he wanted to make Obama look bad. These people are domestic terrorists!
The 14th amendment is very clear that “the validity of the debt shall not be questioned”. In my opinion Biden needs to realize these clowns are not interested in negotiating, and the days of bipartisanship are gone with this group of morons leading congress. Quit going through the time wasting monkey motions with them and just invoke the 14th and pay our debt. No doubt the legal battles will ensue but ours and the worlds economy will remain intact, and the sniveling, traitorous morons in congress will have lost their hostage.