Shutting Down the Government for Fun and Political Profit

[LFC]

Joe has draw his line with Qevin. First, no negotiation over the debt ceiling. If you break it, you bought it. Second, we can talk about the budget but only if you come with your own proposals. Right now there's nothing to discuss because your House members are all over the place. Pull it together. Qevin, being Qevin, responds about as intelligently as you'd expect with a sad, pathetic insult.

McCarthy Hops On The Pudding-And-Jello Train

Of course, these remarks are a performative bad faith for innumerable reasons, chief among them that:

• House Republicans don’t actually have an agenda or a budget to propose cuts to, which Kate Riga unpacks here, and,
• House Republicans are the ones who took the budget hostage, as Josh Marshall reminds us here.

But also, smooth move making elderly jokes about someone you claim you’re trying to negotiate with.

Also also, Biden, perhaps unexpectedly, has incredible teeth.

He really is a f***ing clown shoe who has no idea what he's doing.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 31, 2023 17:04:42 GMT LFC said:

He really is a f***ing clown shoe who has no idea what he's doing.

I would say a f***ing a**h***.  

[LFC]

And the House Republicans still got absolutely nuthin' other than a huge sense of entitlement and an inflexible demand that Joe Biden do ... SOMETHING!!!

McCarthy Lacks A Plan And The Votes

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has such a tenuous grip on his own conference that the debt-ceiling hostage-taking he is attempting to pull off has all the hallmarks of the bumbling kidnapping capers you see in the movies:

• The House GOP can’t agree amongst themselves what to ask for as ransom.
• They can’t get the White House to take them seriously enough as a ragtag band of kidnappers to engage in negotiations.
• They keep threatening dire consequences for not taking them seriously but are repeatedly hobbled by their own lack of consensus.

At this point, McCarthy wants the House to vote by the end of the month on a package that combines the debt ceiling with draconian spending cuts, but he clearly doesn’t have (i) internal agreement on those cuts or on how much to raise the debt ceiling by; or (ii) the votes to push a package through as early as next week.

McCarthy is preparing to bypass the House committees altogether and cobble together a package on the floor himself, Punchbowl reports. If wishing and hoping were a plan …

One word of warning: Political reporters are doing McCarthy a favor by calling what he’s presenting publicly, including in his speech yesterday to the NYSE, a “plan.” It’s not a plan yet. It skews the coverage to pretend it is a plan. McCarthy is taking advantage of this journalistic failure to try to leverage pressure on the White House. The White House ain’t stupid and isn’t biting.

McCarthy doesn’t have a plan or the votes. Until that changes, that’s really all you need to know.

To quote Guardians of the Galaxy...

[AnBr]

"Republicans in disarray!"

[goldenvalley]

Apr 19, 2023 13:48:40 GMT AnBr said:

"Republicans in disarray!"

Sadly their disarray is breeding a lot of uncertainty into the economy. I imagine the Wall Streeters and financial institutions are tearing their hair out trying to guess what path to take.  And politically the chaos created by the disarray just feeds the fear and distrust people in general have of the government.  Republicans again and again prove that government doesn't work!

[indy]

Democrats in disarray makes you go, well, shit, another four years of bad Republican policy. Republicans in disarray makes you go, well, shit, I wonder if we are gonna survive this.

[LFC]

Welcome to MAGAt “bargaining.”

House GOP: Give Us Everything We’ve Ever Wanted And We’ll Extend The Debt Ceiling … ‘Til March

talkingpointsmemo.com/news/house-republicans-debt-ceiling-biden-mccarthy

[LFC]

Qevin McCarthy is now all in on taking the debt ceiling hostage and killing the U.S. economy. TPM has been following the developments as he works to get the necessary votes.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is inching closer to passing his $4.8 trillion grab bag on the House floor today, which would enable the House GOP seize the debt-ceiling as a hostage in negotiations with the Senate and White House.

McCarthy -— despite repeatedly vowing he wouldn’t — once again bent to the pressure from extremists in his caucus and was forced to make changes to the bill overnight to get it through the House Rules Committee. Several of the holdouts seem to have changed their minds as a result of those changes to the package.

It’s still not clear if McCarthy has the votes to pass the bill. He can only afford to lose four Republican votes.

We’ll keep you updated throughout the day.

[LFC]

Looks like the idea that this could really happen has taken hold among businesses.

[LFC]

Biden is following the KISS principle when telling people what House Republicans are doing.

[LFC]

Joe Biden, the guy who is supposedly senile if you listen to Republicans (though why would you?), just changed the narrative again. First he hit them with "they want to cut veteran's benefits" since they demanded cuts. Sure they're whining that's unfair to say but all they need to do is specify the cuts they do demand. So simple, right? Now it look like he's completely dug in on not negotiating with the terrorists and suddenly the view of those covering this issue shifted.

Yesterday, the Times published an article reporting that Biden administration officials have an active discussion about whether the debt-ceiling law is unconstitutional and thus whether President Biden has the right and the duty to disregard it rather than default on the government’s debt and spending obligations. That along with Secretary Yellen’s June 1 announcement hit like a thunderclap against D.C.’s conventional wisdom about how this drama plays out. On a dime the insider newsletters decided that this probably isn’t going to be settled by a simple negotiation, or maybe any negotiation. The extraordinary measures a lot of us have been talking about for some time suddenly started to seem real to them too. The addition of the June 1 quasi-deadline signaled to still others that there probably isn’t time for a negotiated settlement even if the administration decided to negotiate.

Put that together and we seem to be in a new place on this just in the last day or so.

Not bad for a senile old man.

Here are more details on what actions the Biden administration might take.

I have to admit that it would be awful but extremely interesting if the constitutionality of the debt ceiling law were to be brought before right-wing partisan hack SCOTUS.

[jackd]

The court would have at least two problems with the 14th Amendment argument. The first is who has standing to challenge it? Their recent decisions have been quite strict on a plaintiff showing actual harm before being allowed to litigate. The second is the Andy Jackson precedent when he simply ignored their finding of his starting the Cherokees off onto the trail of tears to be unconstitutional. He's reputed to have said."John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." In other words, go pound sand. President Biden could do the same and simply order the Treasury Department to pay the bills and issue whatever bonds were necessary. Or, the court could realize that it could be held responsible for the economic chaos resulting from the Republican refusal to lift the debt limit and hold that statute unconstitutional as it clearly is and require the House to do its bargaining over the budget where it clearly belongs.  They could still shut down the government but would have to specify their funding decisions in the process.

[LFC]

The organization representing government employees is suing Biden and Yellen to "force" them to ignore the debt ceiling law as unconstitutional. It's an interesting way to try to help Biden in this standoff. One important thing they don't mention is that since these employees are looking at having their wages suspended, it would be awfully hard for any remotely reasonable judge / court to try to dismiss them as not having standing. They're facing a direct financial impact.

The National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) filed a lawsuit to block enforcement of a law that sets the nation’s debt limit, arguing it is unconstitutional as a political divide over raising the borrowing cap comes to a head.

The lawsuit contends that, if the debt limit is reached, President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen would be forced to decide which payments to prioritize, violating the separation of powers by taking over Congress’s spending authority.

“The Debt Limit Statute is unconstitutional because it puts the President in a quandary to exercise discretion to continue borrowing to pay for the programs which Congress has heretofore duly authorized and for which Congress has appropriated funds or to stop borrowing and to determine which of these programs the President, and not the Congress, will suspend, curtail, or cancel altogether,” the complaint states.

NAGE represents nearly 75,000 federal employees and asserts that its members are at imminent risk of layoff or furlough once the limit is reached.

“Unless and until the Debt Limit Statute is amended or revised to allow Congress to determine the priority of payments among specific programs once the limit is reached, members of Plaintiff NAGE will suffer irreparable injury from layoffs, furloughs, and loss of employment that are taken without any legitimate authority by the President,” the group wrote in its complaint.

Filed in Massachusetts’ federal trial court on Monday, the lawsuit further states that federal debts must be paid under the 14th Amendment, which states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

“Our priority is to make sure that Congress does its job. There is no way to protect our financial system and our economy other than Congress doing its job and raising the debt ceiling and enabling us to pay our bills. And we should not get to the point where we need to consider whether the president can go on issuing debt. This would be a constitutional crisis,” Yellen said on ABC’s “This Week.”

[LFC]

Qevin's hostage demands are worse than I thought, plus they are as completely unrealistic as they are vague. Here's the level of unspecified cuts they are demanding. Bold mine.

To be sure, the cuts look enormous: Under his plan, most overall nondefense discretionary spending would be slashed by nearly one-third on average in 2024, after adjusting for inflation. The cuts would then expand to roughly 59 percent, on average, by 2033, according to estimates from both the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress.

Here's a good source for what all makes up non-defense discretionary spending. And here's a graph of how "out of control" it is. Clearly the issue is elsewhere. Time to rescind the staggering array of unpaid for Republican tax cuts.

[LFC]

[LFC]

Gee, who didn't see this coming?

[LFC]

Josh nails it. Qevin was never empowered to make a deal. It's John Boehner and the big compromise all over again. There was literally no legitimate reason for him to pretend.

[jackd]

Probably for the best; it may force Biden to use the 14th Amendment.

[indy]

This was always going to be the result. There are some stories circulating that it was all a strategy by Biden to go to the table and then force the GOP to walk away so he was in the position of looking like he was trying but the GOP was just being unreasonable. I don't really believe that but I suppose it is possible.

[LFC]

The bomb throwers seem to still be intent on destroying Qevin's agreement.

So what’s going on now?

The reason these two things are linked right now is that the aforementioned debt ceiling law — founded in a compromise struck last month by Biden and McCarthy — included some stipulations for the appropriations process, including spending levels. So, after this bipartisan deal between Biden and McCarthy was struck, the thinking was that the congressional appropriators would write their various spending bills to the levels agreed upon in the deal, making for a much smoother process than usual.

Right?

Wrong.

House Republicans, some of whom are furious at McCarthy for making the debt ceiling deal with Biden, are insisting on retribution in the form of extremely low levels of spending. Those spending levels agreed to in the deal, they say, are a ceiling that they want to be far under.

McCarthy gave the appropriators the green light to do this, seemingly concerned about angering the right flank of his caucus.

“Two weeks after the deal passed, House Republicans decided to renege on their own deal — everyone else was content to not have this hullabaloo,” Bobby Kogan, the senior director of Federal Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM.

So far, that’s remained the case. Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), the lead Senate appropriators, are writing their bills to the spending levels agreed upon in the debt ceiling law, leaving the House Republicans on an island.

[LFC]

The House Freedumb Caucasians are at it again. (Funny, I thought they found a black guy somewhere along the line. Maybe he's at the back of the bus stage.)

The Dems are staying on message early and often; if there's a shutdown, it's the fault of Qevin and the House Republicans.

While this line-walking has been a constant for McCarthy since before his speakership election in January, Democrats are getting a lot more vocal about calling the hardliners’ flexing out in real time, likely to avoid ambiguity about who is to blame for consistently bringing the nation to the verge of financial catastrophe.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) put out a statement shortly after the Freedom Caucus announced its intentions to continue risking a government shutdown: “House Republicans are determined to shutdown the government and crash our economy. We will fight these MAGA extremists every step of the way,” he said.

Upon announcing that he and McCarthy had agreed that passing a continuing resolution may be necessary next month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made it clear that acquiescing to far-right demands would be a losing battle for the House speaker: “If McCarthy follows the hard right and tries to do a partisan bill he’s going to lose,” Schumer said. “The hard right wants to shut down the government. But McCarthy knows that that would be a disaster not only for the country, but for his party.”

After the Freedom Caucus released their redlines on Monday, Schumer doubled down:

“If the House decides to go in a partisan direction it will lead to a Republican caused shutdown,” he said in a statement.

[goldenvalley]

I clicked on the very first post in this thread dated Sept. 2021.  Different year, same old BS from the Republican House members, only this year they have a narrow majority and good ole' Kevin as a putative leader.

[Bact PhD]

Annnd the worst is averted…literally with hours to spare…all for a few weeks reprieve. Supposedly, McCarthy has has it with the toddlers in his caucus throwing food at the table; we’ll see whether that sentiment holds up long enough to do more than kick the can down the road.

So, how much of this really is just performance art??

[goldenvalley]

Oct 1, 2023 15:14:12 GMT Bact PhD said:

Annnd the worst is averted…literally with hours to spare…all for a few weeks reprieve. Supposedly, McCarthy has has it with the toddlers in his caucus throwing food at the table; we’ll see whether that sentiment holds up long enough to do more than kick the can down the road.

So, how much of this really is just performance art??

All of it.  Gets them hits on right wing tv and keeps donations rolling in.  They don't know how the budget etc really works and don't care to know.  Howling about deficits is something that's been done for years and years but none of them will never ever offer one possible solution...raising taxes on corporations' record profits. 

[indy]

I cannot tell at all what might be going on behind the scene here. Gaetz has promised to do the motion to vacate this week and he only needs a few others to support it but that is crazy because then what happens? McCarthy would need Dem support to continue but that won't come for free. How do Dems trust anything he promises when he already reneged on deals with not only people in his own party (which Gaetz claims is the basis for the motion) but with Dems over the budget deal?