Month: May 2023

It sounds like we might have a deal on the debt ceiling that also sorts next year’s budget and takes the next debt ceiling threshold out into 2025. It also sounds like Biden played his hand about as well as could be managed under the circumstances – say what you want, but the old fella has been at this for a while and knows what he is doing. There’s something to be said for experience.

See, Uncle Joe was holding a bad hand. There were options, like the 14th Amendment declaration (which would probably wind up in front of a known bad and hostile Supreme Court, and who knows how quickly a ruling would come) or minting the platinum coin (with completely unknown results; akin to Phil Coulson holding the Destroyer blaster and saying “Even I don’t know what it does”). But there was nothing that could definitively stave off default, because it’s the market that decides how bad a result that it. And who knows what the market will do – but given that America’s credit rating was sandbagged in 2011 just for coming within 72 hours of default, it’s safe to assume the worst.

The other thing – and the one that still has me worried – is that Kevin McCarthy is the weakest Speaker of the House in history, with no ability to deliver his own side at all. Any deal is at the mercy of support from Democratic votes. His army of car dealers, racist realtors and prophetic rednecks doesn’t actually know what the debt ceiling is or care about the consequences, they just want to own the libs. And cutting a deal is not owning the libs, especially when there’s a very real chance they could tank the economy and prevent Biden being re-elected in 2024. Republicans don’t care about the consequences for others, even for each other, or else we wouldn’t have had a million dead from Covid-19.

And the deal still hasn’t passed. A few people are weakly making noise, but if the former guy starts braying again, who even knows if there are ten GOP congressmen to vote with the Democrats to close the deal. We are five days out and everyone seems confident that matters are sorted, but that’s the problem with situations like this: they don’t fail safe. That is the key flaw in American democracy: it has been damaged and sabotaged to the point where it no longer fails safe. If there is no debt ceiling vote, we default and destroy the economy. If the electoral college does not reflect the popular vote, there’s no alternative. If one party abandons all concepts of shame and responsibility, there is no way to hold a violent insurrectionist to account.

I’ve written before about the minimal steps necessary to restore something approximating democracy – expand the House of Representatives to ten times its size, expand the Supreme Court to a minimum of 13 and work up some form of mandatory retirement – but at the heart of the process needs to be restoring an American system of government that doesn’t set the world on fire if it breaks. The lesson of the 21st century is that decades of deferred maintenance has left us in peril, and I’m running out of room to run further.

Another debt ceiling crisis, twelve years on, brought on by a House in the hands of mental defectives and a press unable to articulate what the debt ceiling is and what default would really mean. It occurs to me we might not get away with this one, because the GOP is too fucking stupid to care whether the hostage dies, and the public is too damn dumb to know who to blame.

The thing that annoys the shit out of me is that the Democrats have given ground every single time. Obama actually negotiated with terrorists, to our cost, and now they are back – to face off with a genial old Washington hand who still believes that we live in a world where bipartisan comity can be achieved in the face of the evidence of the last thirty years. No one who served in the Obama administration can realistically think that the teabaggers and their even more explicitly racist heirs can be good faith partners in a compromise.

But in the end, he’s all we have. Because we had to have a candidate who didn’t frighten Ed Earl Brown. Sure, plague and economic disruption and who knows what, from an administration more corrupt than any in history and probably in thrall to Russia, but if the alternative is a woman? Or someone of color? So because the median voter is ignorant and thick and kind of racist, we had to bring on the safest most unthreatening white man we could expose to the rust belt.

And the thing is, we have to do this because we didn’t excoriate the Republicans who forced an impeachment on Clinton despite being repudiated at the ballot box when they had their finger on the trigger. We didn’t come down like a load of bricks on a Bush who won with fewer votes than his opponent, and then we didn’t do anything to hold his party to account for endless war in Iraq and indifference to economic calamity. We didn’t demand that Mitch McConnell and his minions account for every redneck racist in the party, hang them all around his neck and demand that the GOP answer for every white supremacist the way Democrats had to answer for every minor league rapper or every Berkeley city councilperson. We didn’t treat Texas the way Fox treats California, or Florida the way they regard San Francisco.

In short, no one ever told the Republicans that it’s not okay to rely on the votes of the Klan, that there are consequences for picking a senile reality-TV rapist as your champion, that we live in a society and some things are beyond the pale. Our idiot limp-dick media stuck to all they know how to do, which is sports reporting. And now we live in a nation with cancer too bad to easily remove. All we can do is treat it, slowly and painfully, and hope it’s enough to stave off the advance of the Reaper another month, another year, another two years. And now every election feels like the one where if we lose, we lose forever – but if we win, we have to come back all over again in two years. We have to win every time, or we die. The cancer only has to win once.