I agree with The Great Curmudgeon: There is no debt ceiling crisis. There never was.
Just a reminder that there is no debt ceiling crisis. There's a fake crisis started by Republicans and then embraced by the White House so that everyone gets to use the fake crisis to try to do unpopular things in such a way that nobody, in theory, actually gets the blame.Then, What Digby said.
A few people need to show up in Congress in the middle of the night, cast a voice vote, and we can move on to the next fake crisis.
by Atrios at 14:56
... And next time, when Republicans ask for the total destruction of the Federal Government we must pray that they "surrender" again and agree to only destroy Medicare and Social Security. But the good news is that [the Democrats] have every right to fight your little hearts for what you believe in as long as you understand that it's inevitable you will lose.
The problem with all this is that we know that the president wanted to do a Big Transformational Deal To End All Deals since before he came into office and it is equally clear that he saw this as an opportunity not a roadblock to his agenda. So this idea that it was thrust upon the poor hapless president and his party is wrong. All negotiations have at least two parties or they aren't negotiations. And in our government system one of the parties holds the White House and one half of the congress. They are not powerless and they do have leverage over the Republicans. The idea that one faction in the House of Representatives trumps everything else is simply not true.
If that were true, Bill Clinton would never have survived impeachment. Indeed, plenty of Villagers insisted that he simply had to resign because it was all just so very awful. But he knew he had something on his side -- the power of the presidency itself and the backing of the American people. And until Barack Obama started pounding the drum for his Grand Bargain, a majority of the American people were indifferent to spending cuts and wanted him to focus like a laser beam on jobs. But he got on that bully pulpit and convinced them that he was elected to do Big Things and that a "balanced approach" to the horrors of deficits was imperative and they've come around quite smartly.
They also came around on the fact that raising the debt ceiling was absolutely necessary --- just in time for the House Democrats to be tarred as the crazed obstructionists if they object to this massive, unnecessary slashing of government at the worst possible time. I suspect that was sheer luck, but I will give the President credit for his timing.
One can only wonder what might have happened if he had done the same thing to convince the public that a clean debt ceiling vote was imperative instead and never put these cuts on the table in the first place.
As I'm writing this, Boehner is said to be walking away from the White House's offer to give them the moon and the congress is going to try to hammer out a deal over the week-end. The deadline really is looming now.
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