QOTD -- The Debt Ceiling Ritual

 

"...The biggest win of all, for the nation, is that apparently we get a nearly two-year respite from this ridiculous game. Congress or the president should use that time to eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all.  [snip]

"Democrats should have tried to do away with the debt ceiling when they controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. After this agreement is signed and sealed, Biden should look for a way to have the Supreme Court decide whether the 14th Amendment makes the debt ceiling unconstitutional, as some legal scholars believe.

"Reasonable people need to stop the madness. One of these times, unreasonable people will miscalculate — and deal the nation a crippling self-inflicted blow."-- Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post on the debt ceiling hostage- taking game, and what needs to be done about it.  Only the U.S. and Denmark have a debt ceiling that's set at an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP.

Where we would depart from Robinson is in entertaining any thought that the Republican Supreme Court would be a venue that could rule favorably on the 14th Amendment issue.  

Debt Ceiling Surrender

 

A very inauspicious start to the lame duck session of Congress:

The White House has largely given up hope of Congress raising the nation’s debt limit during the lame-duck session that runs through late December, increasing the risk of a highly partisan, market-rattling fiscal confrontation next year.

Senior administration officials see little chance of attracting any Republican votes for a bipartisan debt limit hike during the short session. And they don’t believe they have the 50 Democratic Senate votes needed to slam through a hike using the budget reconciliation process that would allow them to avoid a Republican filibuster.

If you can correctly guess the name of at least one Democratic Senator who opposes taking raising the debt limit away from Republican hostage takers next year, you've been paying attention:

The administration has determined that if it were to go the reconciliation route on the debt limit, it would face likely opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). And there could be other defectors. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he wants a bipartisan vote to raise the borrowing cap during the lame-duck session. But Republicans, many of whom are eager to use the limit as leverage to extract legislative concessions from Democrats in the next Congress, have shown no appetite for any such bipartisan approach.

Tanking the economy and world markets next year in a high- stakes, zero sum game of "leverage" for cuts in Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security?  Republicans think that'll play to their base, who want their crazies to inflict as much damage on the economy in order to harm the Biden Administration.  We also know Republicans only care about government debt when Democrats are in power.

Certain Senate Democrats (see above) are "deficit hawks" who may also think "negotiating" with bad faith Republican hostage takers burnishes their bipartisan cred in their home states.  Sadly, we don't have the Senate now that we'll have next year, nor do we have the House next year that we have now, otherwise there would be a much better shot at taking this leverage away from the hostage- takers.

What a huge missed opportunity.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

Democratic congressional leaders signaled Sunday they’re willing to consider raising the federal debt limit during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, while both chambers of Congress remain safely in Democratic hands.

Dealing with the debt limit now instead of only a few weeks or days before the Treasury Department is projected to run out of borrowing room would be a break from Congress’ past pattern. But it also would let Democrats deprive Republicans of the chance to leverage it in the next two years if they win the House by holding an increase hostage for GOP priorities.

“We’ll see what they contend that they want to do. But our best shot I think is to do it now,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.

“Again, winning the Senate gave us a lot of leverage for how we go forward if we don’t do it in the lame duck. But my hope would be that we could get it done in the lame duck.”  [snip]

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), fresh off of declaring victory for Senate Democrats Saturday night, was a bit more cautious, possibly reflecting the political and time constraints dealing with the debt limit his chamber would face.

“The debt ceiling, of course, is something that we have to deal with. And it’s something that we will look at over the next few weeks,” he said at a news conference in New York City.

One prominent Senate Democrat, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), came out in favor raising the limit sooner than later, writing in The New York Times that Democrats should boost it “to block Republicans from taking our economy hostage next year.”

For Democrats, the choice may well come down to whether the House falls, as expected, into Republicans hands and by what margin. GOP control would allow Republicans to withhold action on an increase or a temporary suspension unless Biden and Senate Democrats agreed to Republican demands, like trimming Social Security or Medicare spending.

The bad:

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told his onetime White House chief of staff, John Kelly, that he wanted the Internal Revenue Service to investigate his political foes, Kelly told The New York Times.

Among the people Trump wanted to “get the I.R.S. on” were former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Kelly told the newspaper.

“I would say, ‘It’s inappropriate, it’s illegal, it’s against their integrity and the I.R.S. knows what it’s doing and it’s not a good idea,’” Kelly said he told Trump, according to the Times.

“Yeah, but they’re writing bad things about me,” Trump responded, according to Kelly.

McCabe and Comey, both fierce critics of Trump, were ultimately selected by the Internal Revenue Service for an intensive tax audit. The Times noted earlier this year that the odds of any one person being selected for the audit are about one in 30,600, raising questions about how two of Trump’s most visible critics were both selected.

The IRS denied any “politically motivated audits” in a statement to CNN earlier this year, and Kelly told the Times he believes that he guided Trump away from seeking out such investigations during his tenure as chief of staff.

Still, the head of the IRS, Charles Rettig, asked a watchdog to investigate the decision to conduct audits on the pair earlier this year. 

The ugly: 

A leading sanitation company is accused of employing dozens of children to clean the killing floors of slaughterhouses during graveyard shifts, the Department of Labor announced.

Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., or PSSI, a company contracted to work at slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities throughout the county, allegedly employed at least 31 kids — one as young as 13 — to work overnight cleaning shifts at three facilities in Nebraska and Minnesota, according to court documents filed on Wednesday.

Those practices would violate the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits “oppressive child labor” and minors from working in any kind of hazardous employment, according to the complaint. The Department of Labor’s Child Labor Regulations designates many roles in slaughterhouse and meatpacking facilities as hazardous for minors.

In the court filing, U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh asked the Federal District Court of Nebraska to issue a temporary restraining order and nationwide preliminary injunction against the company to stop it from employing minors while the Labor Department continues its investigation.

Initial evidence indicates the company may also employ more kids under similar conditions at 400 other sites across the country, in addition to the 31 minors employed at three sites that investigators already confirmed, according to the complaint.

Prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, and make them serve part of their judgement cleaning the killing floors on the graveyard shift themselves, preferably with Q-tips.

Why Trump Sided With Democrats On The Debt Ceiling

Casting aside all the multi- dimensional chess chin- stroking explanations for why narcissist Man-Baby Donald "Rump" Trump decided to pull the rug out from under his Republican Congressional leadership when he agreed to the Schumer- Pelosi approach for a 3- month debt ceiling increase, Paul Waldman employs Occam's razor to find the truth:

The odds that he [Trump] has an actual opinion about the relative merits of a three-month increase versus an 18-month increase in the debt ceiling are near zero. The political subtleties of the current situation and the potential for a complicated set of challenges in December when the debt ceiling will have to be raised again are probably lost on him. But he knows he was mad at McConnell and Ryan, so making an agreement with the Democrats was kind of like a 5-year-old saying, "I wish Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi were my parents!" when he didn't get to eat cookies for breakfast. Except this 5-year-old is the president of the United States.

Rump, when he tweets or acts precipitously as he appears to have during this meeting, should never be over- analyzed as being tactically or strategically astute. No, he should be seen the way Waldman sees him: as a 5- year- old who happens to be the "president." Sometimes it works to Democrats advantage, as in this instance. But someone as narcissistic and unmoored as Rump can never be trusted as a partner. Just ask Missy McConnell and Lyin' Ryan.

For It Before They Were Against It

It doesn't get any more craven or stupid than this:

Twenty-seven Republican senators voted with Democrats on Oct. 16 to lift the debt ceiling and avert a catastrophic default. And each one of those 27 senators voted Tuesday to "disapprove" of their own votes.

The vote Tuesday was a symbolic "resolution to disapprove" of the debt limit hike. It was mandated by the deal thanks to a last-minute provision inserted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). The motion failed 45-54 because all Democrats opposed it.

Even if it passed Congress, it wouldn't have stopped the debt limit hike because President Obama could veto the measure. The purpose was to give these senators political cover to say they disapprove of a debt limit hike.  (our emphasis)

They're counting on this working, given the low-information, mouth-breathing Rethuglican base.  They might be right.

Debt Limit Monday

Today's the day the United States officially reaches its $14 trillion-plus debt limit, providing yet another opportunity for Rethugs to hold the government hostage in exchange for caving on its far-right agenda. As the linked article points out, the critical date for default will actually come up in August since the Treasury Department can juggle the books for about 11 weeks to avoid default.

Playing chicken with American economic health and prosperity is what the Rethugs, cowed by their teatard/ Randian base, are doing. Regrettably, as usual, the "mainstream media" is failing to call out their tactics. One example, heard the other day on a radio promo for last Sunday's "Press the Meat", host Dancin' David Gregory presented the dilemma as a battle involving entitlement reform and further cuts in domestic spending. That's right: no mention of the revenue side of the ledger. With "honest brokers" like that, who needs Fox News? (Hell, who needs CNN for that matter?)