Don't Take Anything From Republicans

So, the Republicans just spent a couple of weeks frenetically devoted to their strategy of forcing Obama and the Democrats to give them everything they've ever wanted through hostage-taking. It didn't go so well. They were never actually prepared to kill their hostage, Obama knew it, and when they could no longer maintain their willingness to do the deed without actually pulling the trigger, they caved. Completely and utterly. They got nothing. Well, they got something, extra "income verification" for the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out this just says that HHS needs to issue a couple of reports assuring people that there isn't much fraud going on. So, nothing. Republicans lose. It was a lot of fun, and it crushed the Republicans in the polls, though not far enough that they can't recover. In any event, we're back to more or less normal politics at this point, which means budget negotiations between the House Republicans and Obama.

And the Republican stance on how these negotiations should go is the same as it's ever been: Obama should just give them stuff in exchange for nothing. Not in exchange for not blowing up the economy, or for not shutting down the government; no, for now they've given up those bits of "leverage." Just for nothing. If Democrats want to get rid of the sequester, at least partially, they should replace it with... more spending cuts! Like, more in the sense of more new cuts than the sequester cuts being replaced. This, well, isn't going to work. They couldn't get concessions for nothing from Obama back when they had hostages. If this is their offer, it's really not hard for Obama to just say, um, no. And on we go, with our government so divided that nothing ever gets done except when there's a manufactured crisis. Or, as Matt Yglesias suggests, the Republicans could give the Democrats something, something other than tax increases on rich people, to sweeten the deal. Nah, that won't happen.

But is there anything that Democrats should take, if Republicans were to offer it? Specifically if Republicans offered it as part of a deal the other side of which was entitlement cuts. And entitlement cuts, mind you, suck. They're long-term, and they're deeply regressive distributionally. The basic Republican long-term agenda is that they want to keep rich people from having to pay taxes, and in order to do that they need to slash safety net spending. But that's wildly unpopular (oh, did I mention it's wildly unpopular?), and it would play right into people's entirely-accurate stereotypes of Republicans as heartless pro-rich-people bastards, so they can't do it unless they get Democratic support to cover themselves with. That's their core political goal. We should be extremely hesitant to give it to them. The thing on the other side would have to be extremely important, and it would have to be something we won't really be able to get any other way. Is there anything like that?

Wait, What? John Boehner Edition

So I saw the headlines with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) saying that not threatening to blow up the government's finances by failing to raise the debt limit would be "surrender." But I didn't appreciate the context. Apparently the point is that Obama suggested that, if Republicans really wanted to negotiate about stuff, they should fund the government long enough and extend the debt limit far enough to cover the negotiation period. Boehner said that this would be "unconditional surrender" for the Republicans, and that our government doesn't work like that. (I.e., with unconditional surrender by one side the precondition to have negotiations.) Never mind that, you know, if there were no statutory debt ceiling and even if the appropriations process were such that government shutdowns didn't happen, the House Republicans control a crucial veto point of the U.S. government and would therefore have plenty in their arsenal going forward. Nuclear disarmament is not the same thing as unconditional surrender if you maintain your fleet of fighter jets and big ol' conventional bombs, after all.

No, what flabergasts me about this quote is that what Obama is proposing would be completely pointless from the good-guy point of view, which is to say, it wouldn't actually involve disarming the Republicans at all. It's like the broader point about how you can't, you can't, you can't negotiate over the debt limit because if you do you cement a pattern of brinksmanship over it that will inevitably end in financial armageddon, only in fast-motion. The threat would go from "we'll blow up the world tomorrow!" to "we'll blow up the world next week!" Great. That's real unconditional surrender, guys. You're not surrendering anything. You're surrendering one week of world-non-blown-up, and presumably if you win the battle then in the end it won't matter exactly how many weeks it took before you did so. I might be missing something here, although honestly between myself and John Boehner I trust the analytical abilities of the former a whole hell of a lot more, but if I'm not missing anything, John Boehner is saying that holstering his nuclear gun, in the full knowledge that, unless his adversary does what he wants, he'll be able to take it out again in an hour or whatever, constitutes unconditional surrender. Holstering might even be the wrong analogy because it suggests that the other guys could overpower him or something; it's like lowering the gun to where it's pointing at the other guy's feet instead of his chest. And the other guy doesn't have a gun. Surrender! Surrender, I say!

Seriously, you can't make this shit up.

Nope, Sorry, That's Not What That Is

Here's a headline from Huffington Post. I choose them not because I think they're worse than any other more-or-less conventional media types, but because I read them a lot. Anyway the headline is "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling 'Stalemate'." Curious whether that was actually true, I clicked on it and read the first, I dunno, sentence or so of the article. It's not true. His proposed 'solution' is "for the president to come to the table." That's not a solution. It's not a solution in part because the Republicans have spent literally the entire past calendar year refusing, as a matter of principle more than of strategy, to hold budget negotiations with the Democrats. It's not a solution in part because it so reeks of the highwayman in Lincoln's great anecdote, who tells the person he's robbing at gunpoint, "stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer." But it's mostly not a solution because it doesn't acknowledge the fundamental long-term game theory of this situation. If Obama comes to the table and negotiates, and the negotiations are successful, on their own terms at least, he has all but ensured that the debt limit breach will eventually occur, whatever exactly it will entail. Once debt limit hostage-brinksmanship becomes the normal way that divided governments do their budget negotiations, it becomes a matter of statistical certainty that eventually one of those showdowns will lead to the fuse running out and the bomb going off. Negotiating is not a way to end the problem. There could've been things Paul Ryan could have said, without making us suspicious about supernatural possession or something, that would have been proposed solutions to the problem. I'm thinking of some kind of budget deal that included a provision repealing the existence of the statutory debt limit, i.e. giving Treasury unlimited borrowing authority as needed to full the budget deficit. Making a deal under those circumstances would genuinely be better than hitting the limit now, because though it would be capitulation to threat it would be capitulation in exchange for melting down the weapon, thereby ensuring no analogous future threats.

But let's consider it proven that what Paul Ryan is "proposing" here is not a solution to the crisis. Not even a potential solution. This makes the Huffington Post headline wrong. Factually, objectively wrong. A correct headline would've been something like "Paul Ryan Proposes Something He Claims Would Solve the Debt Ceiling Stalemate." Okay, that's overly wordy, but someone more experienced writing news headlines than I could probably improve it. The point is that the only sense in which "the President should come to the table" is a solution is the sense in which Paul Ryan claims it to be one. That it is entirely his assertion that this would work is integral to conveying what he was saying. Or to put it another way, if the headline as written were true it would be huge news. What actually happened is the epitome of non-news. That's not even a matter of, like, subjective ideological/partisan interpretation, it's just true, and the Huffington Post is acknowledging it to be true by placing this story way below their monster mega-story at the top about the debt ceiling. "Paul Ryan Reiterates Silly GOP Talking Point" is barely worth telling anyone. "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling Stalemate" could be the story that heralds the end of the constitutional crisis of 2013, as well as signal the bizarre transformation of the most problematic member of the House of Representatives. That the headline as written also implies a certain level of reasonableness on Ryan's part is also a problem, no doubt, but if Ryan were actually being as reasonable as the headline suggests that wouldn't be problematic. But he isn't, and it's just plain factually true that he isn't, and it's irresponsible to write headlines that say, not just imply or suggest but say otherwise

We Told You So

If you ask people whether the Iraq War was a mistake, most of them will say that it was. Like, two-thirds or more of them will say that. If you ask in 2013, at least. But if you asked people in 2003 whether they supported the war while it was starting up, most of them said they did. Only a few radical liberal types opposed it. You'd think that the fact that most people now agree with the substantive position they were advancing ten years ago would have had some sort of vindicating effect. Nope. As Paul Krugman likes to say, "it remains true ... that for the most part you’re not considered serious about national security unless you were wrong about Iraq." Apparently having been right is not a sufficient defense to the charge of having been a liberal dissident from a mainstream center-right consensus.

Well, it looks like the liberal dissidents might get proven right again. As Krugman himself notes, not surprisingly, the supposedly neutral political establishment has long just sort of assumed that Republicans were highly competent at governing, that they were the party of hard-nosed pragmatists to the Democrats' well-meaning but ineffectual idealists. But now the Republicans have shut down the government. In what they practically admit is a temper tantrum. Competence! No, what we're seeing this week is a party that is fundamentally unfit to be even a small part of the business of governance. And this is not even one tiny bit of a surprise to those of us who've been paying attention the last decade-plus. By which I mean, of course, liberal dissidents. We've been saying that the Republicans were unfit to govern since, well, since forever, but especially since the events of the Bush Administration.

The key, I think, lies in two realizations. First, that Republicans honestly don't care about doing government well. They may even be ideologically hostile to it. After all, according to Saint Ronald, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Government is never the solution, just the problem when it tries to be the solution. So why bother trying? Or more to the point, governing competently provides strong empirical evidence rebutting the central claim of Republican ideology, namely that there's no such thing as competent government. Much better to bungle things, or even better, not to deliberately bungle things but to put people in positions of power who are woefully unsuited for them, with bungling the inevitable result, and then talk about how the government always bungles everything!

That's the substantive reason why Republicans are unfit to govern; the other is tactical. Among the virtues of democratic politics is supposed to be that it provides incentives to the greedy, unprincipled politician nevertheless to do the right thing, because doing the right thing keeps you in power. It's sort of like the way capitalism claims to harness private self-interest to create common good, and about as successful, namely, somewhat in general but with gaping exceptions. But that requires, well, rational self-interest on the part of our greedy, unprincipled politicians. Republicans, however, have bought their own hype, specifically the "reality-based community" hype. Here's that passage again, from the original Ron Suskind article:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

I don't really have cause to analyze this quote afresh. For my purposes the point is that this kind of thinking has crept from the substantive areas of Republican thinking, and in particular the foreign policy substantive areas, to the strategic and tactical areas. The far-right flank of the Congressional Republican Party, in making its demands of leadership as to how they conduct themselves in dealing with the rest of the government, does not draw on, you know, reality. There's not even an attempt to understand what actions will lead to what consequences. It's government by slogan, except it's not just government by slogan, it's maneuvering by slogan. And the thing about detaching yourself from reality is that you don't actually escape it, and sooner or later reality comes back to bite you in the ass. Hard.

For the "are Republicans fit to govern?" purpose, though, the crucial thing is that you won't see it coming. If you truly escape the reality-based community, you lose the ability to know when you're about to make a huge mistake. Hell, you sort of commit in advance to not knowing when you're about to make a huge mistake. That would be listening to the evidence, after all, which is apparently a sign of weakness. So you make huge mistakes, which is to say, you don't avoid the kinds of behavior that will be even a predictable disaster. The combination of these two features is that Republicans have no inherent interest in governing well and lack even the capacity to understand their supposed incentives to do so anyway. That's a dangerous combination, and it all adds up to being deeply and fundamentally unfit to govern. And people like me have known about this since, well, since the reality-based community thing, and since Hurricane Katrina at least. And we've been saying it. Finally, finally the Republicans have misbehaved badly enough that some mainstream types are noticing their fundamental unsoundness, perhaps on the same scale as what happened during Katrina.

So on behalf of we liberal dissidents, who have seen through the Republican Party all these years and whose positions reality has almost inexorably born out over time, and who never ever get credit for having been right, and who are never ever considered to maybe, just maybe, be right the next time too, I just want to say, we told you so.

The Shutdown, Presidentialism, and the Constitutional Crisis This Time

There have been three great political and constitutional transformations in our nation's history. The first covered the period from 1776 to 1789, during which the country declared and then won its independence and eventually settled on a particular form of government, a federal constitution. The next covered the period from, let's say, 1857 (though the starting-point is kind of arbitrary since it had been building for a long time; 1861 would be perhaps a more conventional answer) through 1870. This was, obviously, the slavery crisis, during which the country fought a whole bloody war to answer the question of whether it would keep having slavery. The third was the Great Depression, with the true constitutional crisis period lasting roughly from 1929 through 1937, though the economic difficulties lasted a while longer. The first two were separated by approximately seventy years; the latter two were separated by approximately sixty or seventy years. Projecting forward seventy years from the last one gets you... a few years ago. Or, to put it another way, if you buy this rough extrapolation (which you probably shouldn't, it's incredibly crude), we're about due for a constitutional crisis. Maybe overdue.

Notice anything that could be called a constitutional crisis?

If so, you're not the only one. The federal government is currently shut down. In a couple of weeks it will, unless something happens to change this, hit the statutory debt limit, after which it will not be allowed to sell government bonds to raise revenue to cover the gap between tax revenues and spending obligations. No one knows what happens if that happens. Maybe worldwide financial chaos and depression. Maybe President Obama just ignores the debt limit, which might avert the former and would definitely trigger a full-blown constitutional crisis in its place. One way or another, it won't be pretty. All of this is, of course, happening because the party which controls one of two Houses of Congress, and does not control the White House, has decided that it will refuse to participate in averting these catastrophes until and unless the President basically enacts the entire policy platform of the man he just convincingly beat to secure his re-election. Or maybe even until he enacts something even more ideologically extreme than that, i.e. more extreme than this party's own primary process could endorse. This is, uh, a constitutional crisis. Right on schedule.

It's been building for a while, although fairly few of us have seen it coming particularly long in advance. Some, however, say it could've been foreseen a very long time in advance. Say, two-hundred years or more. As Matt Yglesias details in this post, eminent political scientist Juan Linz spent his life crafting a persuasive argument that presidential democracies are inherently unstable. Essentially this is because, in a parliamentary system, there is only one Government. That is to say, the party with the majority in Parliament just plain governs, with all the powers and responsibilities that entails. If they screw it up, they lose the next election, and the other party (or maybe a new one) gets a chance at the whole "governing" thing. In a presidential system, on the other hand, there are two independent political powers within the government, each with a claim to democratic legitimacy: the President and the legislature. What happens if they don't get along? What happens if they really, really don't get along, such that they cannot between the two of them govern? Linz says there's just no way to resolve that dispute consistent with the principles of democracy, so something else, typically the whims of the military, has to choose a winner. Steve Calabresi, my former professor and perhaps the foremost champion of presidential government, makes a number of good points about the weaknesses of Linz's case, for instance that most of the examples he cites are Latin American countries without a strong judiciary that can act as a potential dispute-settler between the political branches. Still, the current crisis in Washington looks an awful lot like a Linz-style collapse of presidential government, right?

You've Got It Backwards, Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan (R-WI) is right about something. No, really! Well, he's kind of right about it. Let's say he's right about the magnitude, but wrong about the direction. Or something.

Here's what he's right about: the ongoing government shutdown should, in its resolution, be connected to the upcoming debt ceiling we-can't-cope-with-the-fact-that-we've-breached-this-months-ago problem. Here's what he's got backwards: he thinks the debt ceiling should resolve the shutdown. That is, his expectation is that the crisis of the shutdown all by itself won't be enough to force an agreement, and that a resolution will only come as part of the negotiations around the debt ceiling in a couple of weeks. Or, to put it another way, he as a leader of the Republican Party doesn't plan to stop being so insane about everything just because of a little ol' shutdown, and he plans on stringing things out long enough for the threat of an imminent debt ceiling calamity to make Obama back down. One manufactured crisis isn't getting it done, so he's gonna try for two of 'em piled on top of each other.

What should happen, of course, is that sometime in the next few days pressure from constituents should force Republicans to back down. Apparently there's polling showing a nine-point lead in the generic Congressional ballot for the Democrats; if that were to happen in November 2014, say hello (again) to Speaker Pelosi. And probably a ton of Democratic state legislatures who would hopefully mid-decade redistrict the shit out of things. Republicans, in other words, ought to start getting scared. And when they're sufficiently scared, Obama and the Democrats must say to them, we're not letting you out of this until you take the other ticking time bomb off the table. In other words, when they pass a continuing resolution to end the shutdown, it had bloody well better raise or eliminate or suspend the statutory debt limit. And no, that isn't unreasonable; if a "clean" CR passes, without dealing with the debt limit, then the whole shutdown won't have settled anything, and the whole "Republicans threaten to blow up the world in a revolutionary attempt to upend the entire constitutional order" thing will still be very much alive. And that's the problem, not the shutdown. I mean, it's a problem too. Tells you something about the times we live in that a government shutdown is not the problem right now. But it really isn't, and if it causes Republicans to get scared enough that they have to surrender, that surrender had better deal with the actual problem.

So yes, Paul Ryan, the debt limit and the shutdown should get resolved together. But that's not because the shutdown should keep going until it gets reinforcements from the debt ceiling crisis, forcing Obama to enact the Romney agenda once and for all. It's because once your side is forced to concede, and to put down the gun, it should have to hand over both of its guns, especially the bigger one. There's no point half-disarming a hostage taker.

The Supercommittee's Trigger

The idea behind the trigger mechanism backing the so-called supercommittee is that it will make cuts to things that both parties like, therefore forcing both parties to come together and reach a deal to avert those cuts. But it strikes me that's not quite correct. There are a fair number of Republicans at this point who have decided that cuts to defense spending are acceptable. It's certainly not anything like the highest priority on their list of policy goals. Likewise, there are a fair number of centrist-y Democrats who are fine with cutting domestic spending. So it strikes me that, rather than saying there are cuts to things Republicans like and cuts to things Democrats like, we should say that there are cuts to things Republicans don't like and cuts to things Democrats don't like. That changes the dynamic considerably: Republicans can now say, well, if we don't get a deal then at least we get domestic spending cuts, while Democrats can say, well, if we don't get a deal then at least we get defense spending cuts. That should make each party reluctant to support a deal that has too much stuff they don't like and not enough stuff they do like. So I'm thinking, trigger mechanism, here we come... (Barring, of course, the sensible deal in early 2013 to repeal the trigger's cuts.)

Why Not Make Sound Budgeting Constitutional?

Matt Yglesias gives us his concept of a Progressive Balanced Budget Amendment. The idea is basically to make something like the pay-as-you-go rules constitutionally mandated, such that no act of Congress could increase the long-term debt level. Though I have some problems with the workability of this idea in practice, I'm actually drawn toward thinking it's a good idea in theory, for reasons that relate to my thinking about the proper way to do budgeting.

Pelosi's Choice

Apparently Rep. Peter DeFazio says that Joe Biden told House Democrats that Barack Obama was willing to invoke the 14th Amendment option if "all else failed." If that's really true, why shouldn't Nancy Pelosi make all else fail? From what I've heard, she has the power to sink this deal if she wants to. Obama may not prefer a constitutional crisis to a deal, though sensibly he prefers a constitutional crisis to an economic catastrophe. But I think Nancy Pelosi might prefer the constitutional showdown, right? The vote is in the middle of being held, and it sits at 167-101 in favor as I'm writing, but there are a lot of Democratic votes that haven't come in yet. It'll be interesting to see what happens if this does indeed fail.

The Debt Deal and Obama's Preferences

What does the fact that Barack Obama was willing to cut this deal tell us about his own, true preferences? Well, here we start with the observation that, as best I can tell, this is about as good as anything calling itself a deal was going to be. Republicans were never going to accept revenue increases in this deal, so any deal wouldn't include revenue increases. The total number here is on the small end of the numbers that had been mentioned and the cuts are relatively backloaded, the debt limit will be raised through the next election, etc. Moreover, the cuts include a whole frickin' lot of defense spending cuts, which is kind of a win-win. So conditional on there being a deal, this one is not bad.

So, if we accept that basic position about the substance of the deal, what are we left with? Obama prefers getting some deal to getting no deal. That's it. And what happens if we don't get a deal? Either economic catastrophe if the executive branch takes its least active/creative approach or constitutional crisis if the Administration decided to use some unilateral executive power. I happen to think that preferring a reasonably not-bad deal to the "economic catastrophe" option is a little more than completely reasonable. As for the constitutional crisis, while I myself would've found such a spectacle kind of fun and I reckon Obama would have won it, I don't think the President is crazy to not be thrilled at the prospects. If down the road Obama agrees to lots more spending cuts to sundry domestic programs and the big social security trio and then winds up getting all of the Bush tax cuts extended permanently, well yeah, that would suck. But that would suck in the absence of this deal, which I think you can plausibly argue was the best possible outcome once this whole debacle got started, and if Obama manages to fight hard during those future battles and then we win the 2012 elections then the whole thing won't be so bad. That's my take.

UPDATE: Re: this Paul Krugman blog post, I think I more or less agree with Krugman about what I would have done. But that's mainly because I would kind of enjoy the constitutional crisis that would ensue if, let's say, Obama minted a couple of $1 trillion platinum coins and Republicans then impeached him over it, which oh boy would they ever. Or if he just said, screw the debt limit, I have executive power. Or something. He'd get his ass impeached, and while I think there's a pretty good chance that he would win the PR battle over said impeachment I also think that I understand his desire not to put his name on a list that currently reads: Andrew Johnson, (Richard Nixon), Bill Clinton. Clinton won the PR battle over his impeachment, too, but when people discuss his Presidency they don't put the fact that he got impeached in the "pro" column. I don't blame Obama for not wanting that, even if Paul Krugman or I might've been less averse to it.

The Lesson of the Debt Ceiling Debacle

If you elect bad people, bad things happen. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't fundamentally blame Barack Obama for this, though I kind of wish that he would've used some creative executive power to sidestep any of these problems. I don't blame him because the American people, including a whole bunch of staggeringly stupid Democrats who failed to vote, managed to elect a House of Representatives controlled by crazy people last November. That puts a rather low ceiling on the possible outcomes he can achieve. This one doesn't sound very good, because the result of these two years of divided government is not going to be very good. From what I understand part of the rationale for making this deal is that it will weaken the impact of a later manufactured crisis, and not being a member of the Obama Administration I'm not sure I can be certain that isn't rather sound logicking on their part. But fundamentally the lesson that we all ought to draw from this is stop electing crazy people to positions of power!!!!! Seriously, please stop doing that. It's hurting us all, and things won't get better until it stops.

Oh, and anyone who considers themself a liberal or a Democrat and who doesn't like this deal who did not vote in the 2010 midterm elections has quite literally zero right to complain, and ought to refrain from commenting on the whole situation. It's y'all's fault, guys.

This is Not the End Game

One argument, I think, in favor of not reaching any sort of legislative agreement on raising the debt limit in the next few days is that once we've set the precedent of using this sort of manufactured, idiotic crisis as a forum for hostage-style leveraging and concession-extracting, there will come a time when agreement cannot be reached. It is impossible that playing a game of iterated chicken over the debt ceiling will not end in a failure to agree, eventually. So eventually we're going to have to hit the real End Game of that time-lapse battle, which as I see it ends in one of only a handful of ways:

1. Congress abolishes the debt ceiling.
2. The prior tradition of not using debt ceiling votes to extract policy concessions is re-established.
3. We hit the debt ceiling hard, and assorted economic calamities ensue.
4. Some kind of creative use of executive power effectively nullifies the debt ceiling.

That one of these four options is the necessary end result of this game is not something we can change in the next week. We can change whether the time at which we hit the end game is right now or not, and right now it looks like it won't be right now. But we're going to hit one of those four possible results sooner or later. I'm not sure I can see any particular reason to favor doing so later.

Super Congress: Still Not Super, Still Not a Congress

Apparently some sort of "super Congress" will be involved in this debt ceiling deal. Eh. It's still not super, and oh boy is it ever still not a congress. It sounds kind of like the same thing as the Bowles-Simpson committee, a bipartisan commission tasked with creating a deficit-reduction plan that would receive an automatic vote in Congress. How'd that work out? Oh yeah, didn't think so...

More broadly, from what I'm hearing from Obama this deal doesn't sound as awful as I had thought it might be. I'm not sure I'll stick by that assessment as I hear more of what's actually in it, but that's my current impression. Especially if he can use it to pivot back to boosting the economy, or something, as he said in the last line of his press conference.

Yes, It Is That Easy

I just saw a video of Dennis Kucinich on the floor of the House what I assume was today or yesterday, with the following quote excerpted from his speech and a little bit of commentary:

"We are the United States of America, the greatest country on Earth. We envision wealth, we don’t default. We create wealth, we don’t default. We build wealth, we don’t default."

Dennis Kucinich solves like, all our problems in like, one minute and 14 seconds. THAT WAS EASY.

Yes. It is that easy. That's the thing about this whole "crisis": it doesn't exist! There is no problem here. Maybe you think America's debt burden is a crisis, in which case we should talk about that; as it happens, you would be wrong on just about any standard economic measure. But this specific debt limit crisis is 100% manufactured B.S. If everyone on Capital Hill really means what they say about agreeing that the debt ceiling should/must be raised but that they just want to have an honest conversation about our national debt, which they absolutely all say they do, then they could just a) raise/abolish the debt limit, and b) have a serious debate about debt and deficits. The fact that they have not done this means that the Republicans actually don't believe that the debt limit "must" be raised; to them, or to many of them at least, it is much more important to create a fake crisis that they can try to leverage into gigantic policy concessions than to be certain of avoiding the economic catastrophe that begins, oh say 38 hours from now if nobody does anything. Nothing is forcing us to have ticking-time-bomb negotiations right now, not the market, not the economy, nothing. Except, that is, one of our two major political parties. But if you're looking for "the right solution" to the current "crisis," yes, it is that easy: raise the effing debt ceiling, and do it now.

The Republican Obsession with Money

In a previous post, I argued that conservatives have a highly materialistic view of life, that in shaping public policy at least they tend to simply overlook personal, psychological, or spiritual needs like esteem or belonging. In this post I want to argue that the conservative outlook is highly materialistic using the overall approach to budgetary issues that Republicans have (extremely successfully) championed of late. Yes, drawing overarching conclusions about political philosophy from budgeting styles. Anyway, I'll begin by outlining how I think a rational country should approach the whole question of the budget, government spending, and taxation. Here's how it goes:

The Crazy Scheme to Save America

There is a rumor that John Boehner would kind of like to get this debt ceiling debacle over with. It's making him look bad, it risks making him and every other Republican look awful, and he himself is much more of a business type than a Tea Party type, making him not particularly inclined to, you know, destroy the economy. But, the rumors continue, he cannot just announce his support for something like the McConnell plan, which would allow Obama to implement a series of clean debt ceiling increases while simultaneously letting Congress impotently voice its disapproval, and try to whip up a coalition in support of that plan between all the Democrats and a handful of Republicans. Why? Because he would lose his gavel, in an instant. The House Republicans would probably elect Eric Cantor Speaker before the McConnell plan even came up for a vote, and a few days thereafter at the very latest. And John Boehner likes being Speaker of the House; indeed, it is really the only thing he aspires to.

So here's the crazy scheme: all of the people who would vote in favor of the McConnell plan, were Boehner to throw his support behind it, form a caucus to keep electing John Boehner Speaker of the House through the end of this Congress. That way, we get to pass the plan and Boehner gets to keep his gavel. Everyone's happy, right? Well, not the Tea Party types, but they're never happy. And sure, a lot of the Republicans who went along with this scheme would lose their jobs, but if we hit default and the economy gets destroyed I think they'll be in pretty grave danger anyway. This way they get to be the people who bravely sacrificed their political careers to protect the nation's economy, and I'm sure there would be plenty of cushy corporate lobbying gigs waiting for them down the road. As for the Democrats, sure it wouldn't be a lot of fun voting for Boehner as Speaker, but it's a lot better than the alternatives, and they obviously wouldn't be agreeing to support him on anything except the debt ceiling and keeping the gavel in his hands.

Now sure, this is the kind of thing that will never happen, at least not since approximately the 1880s, but I think it would work pretty well, and it would certainly be fun.

Stop Calling It The Constitutional Option

I keep seeing people writing things like, "at this point I'm just hoping the lawyers at Treasury discover that the 14th Amendment option is viable." While I completely endorse the sentiment, and the scenario in which the Administration declares, screw the debt limit, we're gonna keep issuing debt to finance the government, strikes me as pretty clearly the best end result for this debacle, I really do wish people would stop calling it the constitutional/14th Amendment option. It isn't. In fact, the 14th Amendment plays only the a minor supporting role in the logic, as I see it, of unilaterally disregarding the debt limit. Here's the argument as I see it:

"Super Congress"

There isn't very much to say about this proposal for a "super Congress." Congress can set its own rules; if each House of Congress wants to make it such that certain bills cannot be amended or filibustered, I don't see why they can't do that. But what's obvious about the super Congress is that it is neither super nor a Congress. That is to say, it is a body constructed without any direct democratic input and, fittingly for such an institution, it lacks any legislative power. It has recommendation power, in that it can recommend legislation to the actual, legislatively-empowered Congress which the latter will deem itself unusually eager to consider. But no actual legislative power: its proposals still could not become law without, you know, the usual mechanism of being passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. A better proposal than this would probably be to just abolish the filibuster and, perhaps, tighten the rules surrounding amendments. Of course, no one would think that those reforms would make unpopular deficit-reduction bills more likely to pass, 'cause if there aren't 50 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House none of it matters. I can't see why the same complaint wouldn't apply to the "super" "Congress" either.

Misuse of Language Alert: "Deficit"

The word "deficit" is defined, in political/budgetary terms, as the difference between a government's revenues and that government's outlays. That's what it means. Except that isn't how it gets used in American politics these days, especially not by Republicans but also not by the various portions of the mainstream media that like to pretend that Republicans care about cutting deficits while liberal Democrats don't. Because here's the thing: if you put Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, Barney Frank, and Bernie Sanders in a room together, they could zero out the deficit in, say, 2018 or 2021, and they could probably get the basic framework of the plan to do so figured out in an hour or so. Maybe less. You'd have a carbon tax, you'd have cuts in defense spending, you'd have the closing of assorted loopholes that favor large corporate interests, and then you'd have some amount of progressive tax increases on top of that, however much was still needed. Maybe you'd throw in something like a public option on health care, depending on how non-budgetary they felt they could get. And voila, the deficit would be gone.

Obama's Press Conference

I liked what I heard. Obviously it is very true that Obama's been proposing lots of center-right deals, and only Republican insanity has been keeping us liberals from having to watch such a deal become law, but I continue to be suspicious that Obama's known this would happen all along. Anyway, now he's at the point where he is saying, look, get y'all's act together, feel free to just let me do it and then criticize me for it, I really don't care, just get this done. Here's hoping something gets done.