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.