"WE WILL USE THE POWER OF THE PURSE AND THE SUBPEONA"

Last night, after “winning” election to the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives - his life achievement goal for which he would do, say, or give away anything - Kevin McCarthy got up and gave an “acceptance speech” in which he declared war on the United States.

“We will use the power of the purse, and the power of the subpeona, to right this ship.”

This is a declaration of war as clear as the first cannonball that hit the walls of Fort Sumter in 1861.

A seditionist from the Home State of American Sedition, South Carolina, Ralph Norman, stated earlier this week that the only way Kevin McCarthy would ever get his vote was with an ironclad promise that he would hold the debt ceiling hostage and default on the public debt of the United States.

Yesterday, Ralph Norman voted in each roll call for Kevin McCarthy.

You do the math.

The United States is the only major nation stupid enough to have a provision that servicing the public debt must be periodically approved by the national legislature. This was originally put in place in World War I to obtain congressional approval from the seditionists of the Solid South and the isolationists of the Midwest to allow the government to issue war bonds to finance participation in the war. It was done as a “gimme” since no one believed anyone in government would be stupid enough, or obtuse enough, to allow a default by refusing to pay for obligations the government had already taken on.

For the next 95 years, that was the case. Then the (bowel) Movement Conservatives, who were elected from “safe” seats where they were essentially elected to office for so long as they cared to be there, discovered they could threaten to allow the government to default on the debt as a way to force the administration to accept their demands for reducing and ending public expenditures on all the things they didn’t like that no one would purposely elect them in sufficient majority to do as an object of policy. And they have done so twice, and they have found that any political pain they or the Republican Party bore for so doing was acceptable - “acceptable” meaning they were not personally voted out of office by their voters.

This time, the crazies of the House Freedom Caucus - the 21st Century edition of the old Southern Party that kept the country from doing anything progressive for the majority of the citiizenry before the Civil War - want to see their eternal goal of harming Social Security carried out. They want to defund the Affordable Care Act. They want to defund the environmental provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. They want to immediately undo the progress made by the 117th Congress. And now they have “firebreathers” of the quality they produced in the decade before the Civil War in office, people dumb enough, obtuse enough, and ignorant enough to think this is a good idea that must be done.

This was tried by the Southern seditionists in 1867 when the Unreconstructed Confederates were back in Congress and threatened to deny the public debt to force the administration to stop the occupation of the treasonous seditionist states of the former Confederacy. This resulted in the passage of the 14th Amendment, with its provision that “The public debt of the United States shall not be questioned.”

So career seditionist Norman (another good argument for having treated South Carolina in 1865 the way the Romans dealt with Carthage after the Third Punic War, along with every other seditionist politician who has come out of that place since 1797) and his fellow seditionists in the House “Freedom” Caucus is - once again - violating the law with his decision to force such an action.

Everyone has been told that defaulting on the public debt would be a bad thing. Few people know what that would be, past vague allusions to “an immediate recession... or worse.”

Immediately, the Treasury Department could likely prioritize some payments over others, but doing so would require the department to pick from hundreds of millions of monthly payments, and such action could face immediate operational and legal hurdles.

Federal employees would not be paid. This includes the military.

Reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid providers would be stopped.

Payment on all government contracts would stop.

If such a default extended over longer than a month, Social Security payments would be reduced or stopped.

Those are the personal things.

If the country missed a payment on the public debt, this would affect the national and international economic system.

A default could be potentially devastating to foreign investors in U.S. Treasury bonds, including allied nations such as Japan, which held $1.31 trillion worth as of July 2021, as well as rivals such as China, which held $1.07 trillion as of that date and more now. There would be an immediate run on the Treasury as holders of Treasury Bonds - which are considered internationally the safest place to put money - tried to cash in their bonds for what value they hold. According to national law, these payments by the Treasury would take precedence over the obligation to make payments for all other obligations.

If the government misses a payment on those existing loans, it will become more expensive for the country to borrow money because the national credit rating will be downgraded. That could ripple out through the economy, potentially setting off a recession and raising costs for consumer loans such as mortgages, credit cards and car loans. (This actually happened on a limited scale when the Republicans pushed the government into shutdown over the debt limit in 2013; the country has only recently emerged from that increase in interest for loans.)

We came close to this in November 2021, when the Freedom Caucus took things to the edge. At that time, there was a serious proposal to mint a single platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion or more as one of the more plausible options to resolve the crisis.

Since such an event has never happened, experts are not exactly sure what a default would mean or how it would play out, but one thing is clear: the political dysfunction on display would further erode perceptions of U.S. leadership on the world stage. This is why, when President Biden went to the NATO conference in March 2021 and declared “The United States is back,” European leaders responded, “For how long?”

As was the case in 1861 when Fort Sumter was fired on, or in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, the time comes when fighting now - as hard as it might be - is preferable to allowing the situation to continue on.

Yes, fighting those wars was costly to everyone involved. Lots of people had their lives disrupted. But it finally had to be done.

Any suffering we as a country would undergo as a result of holding firm and faceing the seditionists is certainly far less than the people of Ukraine have faced in the past year, and they have held firm in the face of the terrorist threat.

Make no mistake. The House Freedom Caucus is an enemy as relentless as were their Confederate traitor ancestors. So long as they are allowed to continue, particularly now when we have arrived at the crisis point of them having taken effective control of the Republican Party through the weakness and incompetence of Kevin McCarthy, this situation will only worsen.

Let it happen. Hang the event around the neck of every Republican office holder in the country. Make it clear who the enemy is and what they have done. Come 2024 they won’t even stay in office in the red states.

Unfortunately, it seems to take disasters to get the American Mule to notice there is a problem and take action to solve it. Creating modern America took falling into the Depression in order to get to the New Deal.

Our ancestors survived that. Are we really less than they were?

The enemy has declared war and is fighting it now, whether we want to or not.

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