That seems to be the path that were on, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told George Stephanopoulos this morning , with a petulant shrug, as if he were in someone elses taxi. Boehners passivity is stunning for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that he could single-handedly avoid default simply by bringing a vote to raise the debt credit counseling ceiling. In fact, one person said this week he would do just that: John Boehner, who, according to congressional sources, has been quietly telling his caucus that he would raise the debt ceiling with Democratic votes before he would allow default. Some thought this information was leaked precisely to force Boehner off of this positionif he was heard admitting he wouldnt kill the hostage, the hostage-taking gig was up. Thus you have the conflicted Boehner we saw this morning, both defiant and resigned, simultaneously daring Obama to call his bluff and acquiescent to the fact that he would take the blame when it happened. This strange new determinismthe idea that breaching the debt ceiling is dialectically and structurally necessitatedis simply the latest in a series of GOP attempts to avoid responsibility for the shutdown and looming debt crisis. Their previous attempts, mostly focused on ObamaCare, have been so lackluster that at least one poll says that the House is now back in play in 2014 , the exact 1998-redux Boehner was trying to avoid. His next maneuver is to take away the GOPs perception as catalysts, to make them seem only players in an historically inevitable showdown. Crucial to this narrative is a bit of historical revisionism. After all, we were here just two years ago, when the United States credit rating was downgraded as a result of the debt ceiling brinksmanship induced by the 2010 tea party class, the most blaring sign that the debt ceiling debate was unforced error of irrevocable magnitude.
And the president is risking default by not having a conversation with us.” Obama has repeatedly vowed not to negotiate on whether the country is able to keep paying its bills. Boehner’s speakership is at risk if he defies conservatives and allows the borrowing limit to be raised cleanly. The deadline is Oct. 17 and Boehner said the U.S. is currently on a path to default. “That’s the path we’re on,” he said. “The president canceled his trip to Asia. I assumed — well, maybe he wants to have a conversation. I decided to stay here in Washington this weekend. He knows what my phone number is. All he has to do is call.” According to leaks by House Republicans last week, Boehner has told colleagues privately he won’t permit default and will raise the debt ceiling with Democratic votes if need be.
A new view was trotted out by Rand Paul (R-KY) on Meet the Press this morning, in which the deficit hawk revised Standard & Poors judgment to be almost entirely a verdict on the United States debt itself. Hes not wrong: Standard & Poors did chide the deficit reduction plan for falling short of what the agency wanted for a post-recession debt stabilization. But S&P argued the fiscal compromise in large part underwhelmed due to the absence of added revenue, better known to us laypeople as taxes. As these were the days of hardline conservatives refusing even a 10:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, it was clear that revenue, no matter what it was called, wasnt on the table. Thus tea party intransigence was not a tangential aspect of S&Ps downgrade, but the primary wrench in the machine they wanted to see functioning. But under Pauls reading, the debt ceiling brinksmanship of two years ago finally and thankfully threw the U.S.s debt problems into relief, a problem notarized by the rating agencys responses. This reading neatly flips the heroes and villains of that dispute: if S&P were turned onto the U.S.s debt problem by the tea partys fit over the debt ceiling, it makes the GOP into conscientious objectors rather unprecedentedly reckless legislators, people who spotted the fire rather than started it. Todays Republicans clearly want this battle over the debt ceiling to be an extension of this imaginary version of the last one. This fight was going to happen one way or the other, Boehner told Stephanopoulos this morning, and if you buy the theory that breaching the debt limit is not an avoidable catastrophe irresponsibly induced by one party but another iteration of the GOP refusing to ratify more profligate spending, hes right. John Boehner obviously doesnt buy this theory, as, if reports are to be believed, hes working furiously behind the scenes to avoid the exact scenario hes decrying as inevitable on the Sunday shows. But the party he only fitfully controls very much believes this story of their own concoction, and that should gravely worry everybody.
The US government was forced to shut down on Tuesday for the first time in 17 years after Congress failed to pass a stopgap spending measure to fund government operations. The House refused to pass a spending bill that did not include the measure to defund Obamacare, and the Democratic-controlled Senate would vote only on a bill stripped of the measure. In a sign the impasse was expected to continue, the Pentagon on Saturday announced it will recall most of its 400,000 furloughed civilian employees. Defense contractor Sikorsky, maker of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, said the Pentagon action means it can defer plans to furlough without pay 2,000 of its employees starting Monday. The absence of Pentagon overseers had been expected to disrupt operations at US defense contractors like Sikorsky. The House, meanwhile, unanimously passed a bill to retroactively pay the hundreds of thousands of furloughed government workers, in a bid to ease some of the pressure from an unhappy public. Obama has insisted he will not negotiate with Republicans until they pass a temporary spending bill reopening the government and agree to raise the debt ceiling. “For as reckless as a government shutdown is, an economic shutdown that comes with default would be dramatically worse,” Obama said in a radio message Saturday. Obama said there were enough Republican and Democratic votes in the House to “end this shutdown immediately.” But Boehner blamed the crisis on Obama’s refusal to negotiate, and insisted he would not budge without what he described as a “conversation” on spending. “My goal here is not to have the United States default on their debt.
We come up to a level that is close to the government’s debt ceiling. And what happens is: instead of the debt ceiling getting raised as it would be normally to cover all the government’s obligations, the Republicans have used the debt ceiling and the budget more generally as a way to fight the Democrats and to prevent government spending on programs that have already been passed. The programs have been passed. For example, Obamacare has been passed into law, has been approved by the Supreme Court. But the Republicans are trying to stop these things on the premise that the American people hate government, and so that they want to destroy the government, they want to eviscerate the welfare state. So the debt-ceiling debate is not really just about the debt ceiling. It is about the government providing means of well-being for people in the society. And the Republicans are trying to stop that. DESVARIEUX: Is there anything resembling a debt crisis in the U.S.? POLLIN: There is absolutely nothing resembling a debt crisis in the U.S. If we–and we’ve talked about this on previous editions, but it’s important to reiterate. Let’s be very specific. If we want to define a debt crisis in a way that one would typically define it, like with the government in Greece, or even a household, what we would be referring to is an inability of the person in debt or the entity in debt, the government in debt, to pay its obligations that are forthcoming, for the government to cover its interest payments next month, six months, over the next year.
