The leadership of the Senate has agreed to a small increase in the debt limit, enough to keep things going for another two months. But naturally there's a hitch: Ted Cruz, always desperate to position himself as the biggest asshole in the room, says he'll filibuster it. That means Mitch McConnell needs to find ten Republicans to break the filibuster and allow the deal to go forward.
That's a problem because Republicans are unanimously afraid to vote for even a short-term extension of the debt ceiling. That apparently includes even senators from ultra-safe states who would be taking no serious risk. It also includes senators who are not up for reelection until 2026, by which time this will all be ancient history.
In the end, I imagine McConnell will manage to cajole ten votes out of his caucus. But just barely. They're more afraid of Fox News than they are of wrecking the good credit of the United States.
Go Ted! I’d love to see them blow it up. Why wait until Christmas when they can do it now? Americans deserve to suffer for strapping a bomb to their economy and hanging the trigger to republicans.
americans, like it or not, includes you.
Given what I've seen of how McConnell operates, he had those votes in hand when he made the offer. Cruz is posturing for the cameras, as usual.
Put another way, there is no way that McConnell will ever let the likes of Ted Cruz make him go back on a promise. I don't like the policy that McConnell supports, or the things he does to advance that policy, but I will afford him that respect.
I'm thinking that very few Senate Republicans want to be responsible for a debt default either. I mean, the donor class understands just how terrible that would be, for one thing. The House - specifically the Freedom Caucus - was far more committed to this kind of thing than the Senate ever has been.
Blunt already let it out of the bag. There are over 40 Republicans willing to raise to the debt ceiling, the horse-trading is over who will be the 10+ who get to do so publicly.
If Biden has Cruz deported to Canada would anyone object?
A lot of Canadians, I'm sure.
Maybe they’ll build a wall to keep him out.
Then we can build a wall to keep him out, too, and at last everyone will be happy, even Ted Cruz because he won't have the rest of humanity around to bother him anymore.
+++
👍👍👍
Don't tell me-- McConnell's famous iron grip on his caucus isn't looking so locked in now? What a humiliation this is for him, to be flailing around, unable to get his people to cover him on a deal he shook with Schumer on.
Personally the ones I'm most disgusted by are the likes of Pat Toomey and Rob Portman, who are both retiring from the senate, who have positioned themselves as knowing something about economics, and whose careers have owed a lot-- you could say have owed almost everything-- to the almighty dollar's position in the world economy.
What unbelievably rank cowards they all are, beyond words. Pusillanimous (pew-sillanimous?) doesn't begin to describe them.
Hard to say that Cruz making such a good case for tossing the filibuster is a bad thing.
I assume that is McConnell’s worst fear - that Cruz succeeds in making the end of the filibuster look reasonable.
Bingo.
Past time for that better messaging that many have said Democrats need; most Americans undoubtedly think that this need to raise the debt ceiling is related to current Democratic legislation - not to the past administration's tax cut for corporations & the wealthy (promised by trump the very morning after the election) & spending.
Debt cannot have anything to do with the trump tax cuts because, as it was done through reconciliation, it had to have zero net cost and not increase the deficit , right ?
No, you are thinking of Pay-As-You-GO (PAYGO), which has over 150 exemptions, and the notorious ten-year look-ahead, which I believe was used to get the Trump tax cuts through.
The basic problem here is one where democrats as well as Republicans deserve blame, and media too.
And that is the concept that voting for cloture is the same as voting for the underlying bill. It is not and should never have been treated as such .
With a filibuster, there should always be a respectable position of voting for cloture if there has been enough debate but still voting against the bill itself. And voting against cloture should mean that not only do you disagree with the bill itself but think it is so crucial an issue or so outrageous constitutionally to not shut off debate.
The idea that a filibuster means that you always need 60 votes to pass anything is not the way it really should be used anyway. And especially for nominees.
And do not say that it is the fault only of Republicans that this is where we are . Both parties have continuously abused the filibuster and trying to say who started it is ridiculous.
If Ted Cruz feels like this is important enough ( and if you believe that we are reaching unsustainable levels of debt , it is ) to filibuster, then why should he give unanimous consent? Ted Cruz is not being unreasonable at all in that regard.
What is ridiculous is that other republican senators would be willing not to object to unanimous consent, but unwilling to vote for cloture . That is nutty.
The idea here I suppose is that Republicans, by simply not objecting to unanimous consent, are not really voting to allow the debt increase. But voting for cloture is voting for the debt increase. Dumb . There should be the highest standard for a unanimous consent - for something truly non controversial. Voting for cloture should be the lowest standard - including for some things you disagree with but not to an extent to block a vote .
Ted Cruz is NOT being the asshole here with respect to the voting public. The assholes were the other senators creating this stupid gamey cover-up where Republicans are allowing a debt increase without voting.
On issues like this , which makes Cruz unpopular with his colleagues by not going along with silly games, I fully support him.
A principled senator might even decide to literally filibuster 100% of senate business until the filibuster is removed from the Senate's rules. I really do wish someone had the guts to do this. OK sure one senator can't technically filibuster but they could object to unanimous consent which practically amounts to the same thing.
The filibuster may well be sort of a goofy way to simply say something needs 60 votes to pass, but a pretty easy google search produced a bunch of bills that fell just short of 60, and many of them were ones that liberals were very happy did not pass.
I mean, cloture assumes that the whole concept of debating a bill is actually a real thing, which it obviously isn't - well, it is in the sense of a Senator trying to get air time, but its not actual debate where anyone expects to change anyone's mind. That happens in the hallways.
As this year's budget was passed by a Republican Senate not voting to increase the debt limit looks rather ridiculous, especially since I have yet to see what exactly Ted jackass Cruz proposes in the alternative.
But the reasons its Senator Ted Cruz and not Senator Rational Thought is that Senator Cruz knows that his reelection chances depend on his making sure his constituents know he is right in there with "the Fed government is a joke" theme.
Senator Rational Thought is on here pointing out flaws in Senate procedure, Ted Cruz is out there flirting with shutting down the gov for no reason at all.
But the contrapositive is true - voting against cloture is the same as voting against the underlying bill - in fact, better than voting against the underlying bill, because you need only at most 41 votes to prevent passage. The worst abuse is that a vote against cloture was supposed to be a vote to continue debate, but now is a vote to suspend debate on the bill and move on to other business.
Ted Cruz is making the Republican senators do it in a honest way. If ten republican senators want to allow the democrats to pass something without filibistering it, they should just vote for cloture. If they don't they should not agree to unanimous consent.
Cruz is not stopping a debt ceiling increase by doing this. He is only stopping it being done on a dishonest way.
And the idea of McConnell I guess is that allowing it to be done through unanimous consent without any republican objections is somehow politically better than just having 10 Republicans vote for cloture. That is just dumb to me.
Republican campaign says democratic senator a voted to increase debt to x dollars. Democratic campaign responds and says the republican senators all agreed . And republican campaign says no we didn't. We just allowed unanimous consent?
I'm just hearing this news. And it's good news as far as I'm concerned.
Notice McConnell suddenly became open to a deal when Democrats started talking about a filibuster carve-out. Coincidence? I doubt it. The last thing McConnell wants is for Democrats to permanently render the debt ceiling a less potent political weapon.
So, hopefully Ted Cruz's assholery will force even people like Joe Manchin to see the light, and take decisive action on the debt ceiling.
Manchin was opposed to a carve-out, so it looked doomed. But there are GOP Senators representing states where banking and finance are very important (North Carolina: Bank of America, South Dakota: Citibank); wonder if any of them were dropping hints about being open to the idea of a carve-out?
I'm trying to be cautious wrt reports about what Manchin or Sinema (or any Senator) is claiming they will or won't do. I suspect Manchin might have made his "no carve-out" statement after he learned that McConnell had decided to relent (but before this was made public). Supposedly earlier that day (or the previous day?) neither he nor Sinema had raised an objection when the possibility of a filibuster carve-out was broached in a meeting of Senate Democrats. Also, I find it telling that McConnell backed down after talk of a carve-out was widely reported...
A while back I heard Manchin say out load that eliminating the filibuster would increase polarization in the Senate. Frankly, I see it as just the opposite. It may be true that decades ago in the Senate, some commonly accepted "norms" about the use of the filibuster made it a tool that the minority could use (sparingly) if the majority was indeed steamrollering the minority. But that's not how it works today. If anything, the filibuster increases polarization by encouraging "block" voting against cloture simply to throw sand in the gears of the majority party. In this century, I don't recall ever seeing a case where the use of the filibuster has led to bi-partisan negotiation of compromise results. Am I wrong about that?
Ditch it and find a better way to achieve the original intent, which was, I believe, to protect the minority party from not having an opportunity to have input on the final result.
Yes, you are wrong about that. Just earlier this year, the infrastructure bill had to be a compromise to get enough Republicans on board due to filibuster.
But it is true that it does not force compromise as much as it could because of the reconciliation option and all of the games that can be played in order to get around the reconciliation limits such as it having to be deficit neutral. In reality, reconciliation bills on both sides are never truly deficit neutral and always in the end increase the deficit. And the majority tries to squeeze some things into reconciliation that really do not belong there, limited only by how fair the parliamentarian is and how far the majority respects those rulings.
Since you can stuff so much into reconciliation, that limits the power of the filibuster. Except for the fact you can only do one a year. So , if the majority is still trying to negotiate their one big bill, they have to compromise in the meantime if want to do anything else.
Mr. Rational Thought: Can you make a case for how the filibuster encourages bipartisan work on legislation in today's environment. I don't see it and I don't see anything in your response that makes that case.
The so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill would never have a chance without the reconciliation bill Build Back Better. The 60 vote cloture rule no longer serves the original intended purpose. It has become a tool available to each party caucus in their war with each other. We don't elect people to conduct inter-party war. We elect people to use their heads in representing the unique perspectives of their home district in working with other elected representative to pass laws that are good enough to provide a net positive benefit for the country, not for one party or the other.