The Brief Life of Bipartisanship and the Return of the Wingnuts

Hey, remember how the modest two year budget deal hammered out by Paul Ryan and Patty Murray was a sign that insane partisanship was on its way out? Yeah, you can stop shoveling dirt in gridlock's grave, because Republican hostage-taking isn't all that very dead yet.

Wall Street Journal: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) signaled that Republicans would not raise the debt ceiling next year without some sort of concessions from Democrats, saying lawmakers were still crafting their strategy.

“We, as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit,” Mr. Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. “We don’t want ‘nothing’ out of the debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we can accomplish out of this debt limit fight.”

The U.S. government spends more money than it brings in through taxes, which means the Treasury Department has to borrow money by issuing debt. The government can only borrow money up to a certain level - called the debt ceiling – which is set by Congress. In October, lawmakers agreed to “suspend” the debt limit until Feb. 7, 2014. The White House has said it will no longer negotiate with Republicans on conditions for raising the debt limit, but many Republicans have said they will only vote to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for budget changes like spending cuts.

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GOP Collapsing Under the Weight of All That Crazy/Stupid

Things are going very, very badly for the GOP right now. Their poll numbers aren't falling, so much as crashing in a precipitous fashion that one pollster described as "jawdropping." The Obamacare demands have been dropped -- looking back, those demands had the lifespan of a fruit fly. The discussion now isn't about how much spending to cut, but whether we'll continue on with sequester-level spending levels. There was never a time when this government shutdown/debt limit gamesmanship wasn't a disaster for Republicans. Instead, it's an ongoing catastrophe that keeps getting worse.

"It’s just a question of the terms of surrender right now," Mark Halperin told the panel at Morning Joe. "Part of what’s driving the dynamic is Democrats know they are winning and Harry Reid and the White House have the attitude of, ‘Why should we give anything because they’re coming our way,’ and they’re waiting"

In other words, this is over. Not because Republicans are in a surrendering mood, but because it cannot possibly turn out any other way. Republicans have lost their little gambit.

But that's not going to be the narrative on the right after the dust clears. The base will hear only a Rambo-like "we could've won if only the politicians had let us" line of propaganda. That Barack Obama and Harry Reid were on the brink of caving in before John Boehner and Mitch McConnell lost their nerve. As a result, many of the right's most faithful voters will learn absolutely nothing from this beating and may make even greater and more suicidal demands of John Boehner.

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Tea Party's Creating Enemies, Not Allies

It's actually been nothing new. It wasn't long after Tea Party Republicans came to Washington in 2010 that they began to wear out their welcome. Shills for a handful of billionaires, the 'baggers were originally seen as just the sort of fresh blood a party in decline needed. They were ideologically extremist, sure, but newly elected people are always like that. Elected office is a form of activism, after all, abd these were just activists taking it to the next level. Washington -- and the Republican Party especially -- was already full of extremists, but that didn't mean that nothing could ever get done. You talk big and settle for what you can get. Besides, complaining brings in the campaign funds. Nothing raises money like a grand battle yet to be won. When you win the war, the soldiers go home.

But the 'baggers weren't interested in baby steps. They wanted the world and they wanted it now. Nothing less than total victory -- without compromise -- was acceptable and the leadership of more experienced lawmakers was spurned. By God, the Tea Party would either "save" the nation or destroy it, because anything less that Tea Party purity is considered communism, nazism, and various and sundry other forms of tyranny. In a world of black and white, with no subtleties of gray, they think they stand for liberty and anything else is tyranny. So why not destroy the nation if you don't get what you want? Anything short of what you demand represents the destruction of the nation anyway. This is what a generation raised on talk radio have become -- lunatic extremists who don't believe their political opponents are merely wrong, they believe the left is representative of every political evil visited on mankind throughout history, from Hitler to Stalin to the KKK. You don't compromise with the devil.

This is all very, very insane, of course. The old guard Republicans know it. But these new 'baggers can't be reasoned with, because as we've already established, they're insane. The insane are beyond reason by definition. The Tea Party wasn't the infusion of new blood that it at first seemed to be, it's a harmful force to be fought. Mention of the GOP Civil War has popped up from time to time, but it has never been anything other than a cold war. That is, until now.

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The GOP -- Pretend Warriors in a Made-Up War

If you want a good indication that the current particular manufactured crisis of a government shutdown threat is winding down into nothing, I give you the fact that Republicans are already talking about how they plan to use the debt ceiling as a hostage strategy to attack Obamacare. This plan presupposes the failure of the current attempt, obviously. Greg Sargent gets to the skinny:

The conservative drive to threaten a government shutdown to defund Obamacare is collapsing, thanks in part to the news that Mitch McConnell won’t vote with Ted Cruz, effectively meaning the strategy is dead. So now, multiple reports are telling us that House Republicans are preparing to use the debt limit to force an Obamacare delay.

This comes as new polling confirms yet again the basic dynamic here: The American people, even if they disapprove of Obamacare, do not support using this fall’s fiscal confrontations to sabotage the law, whether we’re talking about a government shutdown or the debt limit.

Aha! So that's how they're going to destroy Obamacare once and for all, by... delaying it?

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In Obamacare Defunding Fight, GOP's Best Option is to Take a Dive

"Most Americans these days are simply ignoring Republicans. And they should."

That's the first sentence of an op-ed former GOP Senator Judd Gregg, published in the capital newspaper The Hill. The subject is using the debt ceiling to defund Obamacare and the title, "Defunders are playing Russian roulette with GOP, writes ex-senator," makes it pretty clear he thinks it's a bad idea. Not that he's a fan of the Affordable Care Act -- he's just not willing to burn the nation down to get rid of it.

An approach to the debt ceiling that says one will not vote for its extension unless ObamaCare is defunded is the political equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all the chambers of the gun loaded. It is the ultimate no-win strategy.

You cannot in politics take a hostage you cannot shoot. That is what the debt ceiling is. At some point, the debt ceiling will have to be increased not because it is a good idea but because it is the only idea.

Defaulting on the nation’s obligations, which is the alternative to not increasing the debt ceiling, is not an option either substantively or politically. 

I.e., the problem with playing politics with "must pass" legislation is that it's making a threat with a doomsday machine; you can't set it off without destroying yourself in the process. The old cold war principle of mutually assured destruction applies -- if you go to war with this particular nuke, no one wins because no one survives.

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The Platinum Debt Limit Option

First and foremost, let's get this little factoid out of the way: raising the debt ceiling doesn't add to the deficit in any way. It's a way to pay for funds that have already been spent -- and authorized -- by congress. Therefore, not raising the debt ceiling likewise does nothing to reduce spending, deficits, or the national debt. It would, however, mean economic disaster. Think of it as a credit card payment -- except with this card, if you miss one payment, you default and go into bankruptcy. Seriously, this is really, really bad.

So Republicans who threaten to vote against raising the debt ceiling as a way to reduce spending and the deficit are lying or stupid. The move would save nothing, while the actual cost may be incalculable. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments wouldn't be made. Federal employees -- including members of the military -- would not be paid. Federal bondholders worldwide would see their bonds become irredeemable. The ripple effect would spread out from the US and likely create a worldwide economic crisis, earning us few friends in the world. Our credit rating would crash. We may even finding ourselves facing economic sanctions from bond-holding nations as a result. This would be an incredibly boneheaded move and anyone who seriously argues for taking that route loves America not at all.

It's a variation of the he-who-smelt-it rule that those who mostly loudly proclaim to love America most are those who love her least. Tea Party Republicans claim to be the biggest freakin' patriots in the whole world, while arguing that America's best days are behind her, that great things are now impossible, that we must scale back our national ambitions and become a small people with measly dreams of a not-extremely impressive future. They march under a banner of "Status Quo Forever!" -- except they advocate a step back and down from the status quo. They're cowardly anarchists who hate government, but want to keep the police and military. Otherwise, everything can go. We used to all be in this together as a team, 'baggers envision a nation where everyone's on their own. One nation, no longer individual but divided into millions, each trying to get what they can cheat others out of and to screw everyone else as fast as they can. Social Darwinism run amok.

So, of course, we can't count on these guys do actually do what's best for the nation. There's no guarantee that they will. And that's where a crazy scheme to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin comes in.

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GOP Shouldn't Be Eager to Play Debt Limit Chicken

Many Republicans are consoling themselves over the fiscal cliff fiasco by tricking themselves into believing they can make up lost ground in the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations. After all, they argue, the GOP has the hostages leverage. If the White House doesn't give into their demands, they can crash the economy.

The problem with this thinking is that the debt ceiling fight -- as was the fiscal cliff fight -- was not a hostage negotiation so much as it was a game of chicken. That is, if Republicans could crash the economy if they didn't get what they wanted, so could the President for the same reason. The question then, was who would climb out of the twisted wreckage and who would wind up on life support. Polling showed that Republicans would be the ones taking the damage, so it was Republicans who made the biggest concessions. Any hostages held -- and there were hostages -- didn't mean crap.

An old hand at political brinksmanship (and over-the-brinksmanship, for that matter) is warning the GOP that the debt ceiling fight is not going to be the big chance at a political comeback Republicans seem to think it will be.

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