Debt

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive. Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds.

Kevin McCarthy rose to the speakership despite being loathed by a lot of very online conservatives and a rump portion of his own party in the House. He had to win that role across multiple votes, which the media pronounced as humiliating, indicative of a GOP incapable of governing and all the normal tropes that partisans such as Jake Tapper deploy in place of real informed analysis of the situation. This is why they’ve proven to be so utterly wrong about McCarthy’s strength as a leader since taking the gavel.

It’s almost spring, and you know what that means: buds popping on the trees, birds chirping as the days grow longer, and the president introducing a budget that will be quickly forgotten. And so it's happened. But there have been a few interesting twists that could make this budget season more interesting than most. President Biden wrote an op-ed for the Wednesday New York Times presenting his plan to “extend Medicare for another generation.” The piece was largely predictable: calls to raise taxes on the wealthy as a way “to increase the program’s solvency by twenty-five years.” While some fiscal conservatives welcomed the president’s willingness to raise the issue of Medicare solvency, his ideas are largely dead on arrival for Republicans.

Recent mass shootings have reminded us of just how much gun violence has surged since Covid. The record of 45,222 Americans dying from gun-related injuries in the first year of the pandemic could well be topped in 2022, with more than 12,000 fatally shot since the end of April. Many rightly condemn progressive district attorneys in cities for failing to condemn the increased bloodshed. Yet the uptick in violence has been uniform across the nation, plaguing rural counties as much as urban ones, which is why most psychological experts put the blame squarely on the emotional residue of lengthy Covid lockdowns.

That the federal budget process is broken is the worst kept "secret" in Washington. The White House and Congress know it. The think tanks know it. A 2010 study from the progressive Center for American Progress called the budget process “not a pretty picture.” The conservative Heritage Foundation said in 2005 that the process “stifles debate, prevents cooperation, and frequently breaks down.” Proposals come along every few years to fix the problem, but nothing ever gets done. “The fundamental reason why the federal process is broken is because Congress doesn’t have a budget,” says Kurt Couchman, a senior fellow at Americans for Prosperity. “Congress doesn’t do a budget. Congress does appropriation bills, there are 12 of them.

If a recent Scientific American opinion piece purporting to explain how growing opposition to critical race theory damages public education reveals anything, it is that the real problem with today’s left goes much deeper than its progressive ideology. The co-authors assert that resistance to CRT is based on white supremacy, a refusal to acknowledge history, a rebirth of ‘50s-style anti-communism, and the conservative desire to harden racial divisions. These stunning inaccuracies raise questions not just about the validity of their argument but the competence of the supposed experts making it.

It seems strange, but just two decades ago the United States government had a balanced budget. Bill Clinton had run for president as a new type of Democrat, calling for an end to the deficits that had so bedeviled George H.W. Bush. Thanks in large part to pressure from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, he pulled it off. Clinton trimmed military spending and signed into law a package of tax increases. This cued haunted house noises in the parlors of center-right think tanks, but Biden also approved more conservative-friendly measures like domestic spending cuts and welfare reform. This bipartisan approach, in conjunction with a galloping economy, led to the unthinkable: budget surpluses for four fiscal years in a row.

If you think Washington couldn't get any more dysfunctional, think again. On Monday night, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic attempt to avoid a government shutdown. This raises the temperature in a Congress that’s already had, shall we say, a pretty high fever since being sworn in on January 3. Depending on who you ask, the Republicans’ latest action is either a brave attempt at stopping Biden’s massive spending package — Mitch McConnell’s stated perspective — or a foolish gamble bringing us one step closer to a debt default, as Democrats claim. In a sense, both sides are right. But Washington also needs to remember that refusing to raise the debt limit is akin to cutting up the credit card after maxing it out. It doesn’t solve the actual problem.

The Biden administration’s latest $3.5 trillion spending proposal continues to attract attention. With a hodgepodge of Democratic priorities ranging from climate change to Medicare expansion, the bill is the more partisan companion of the administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Of course, another blockbuster story has been distracting attention from these packages — the difficult withdrawal from Afghanistan. Many in Congress continue to be critical of the administration’s handling of the pullout, and some are determined to use the crisis to their political advantage.