It's worth going back in time a few months and remembering why the debt ceiling even still exists. Why wasn't it raised unilaterally by Democrats during the November/December lame duck session? Janet Yellen was certainly in favor.
Technically, the debt ceiling could have been increased easily via reconciliation. The procedure is straightforward: It starts with the House and Senate budget committees writing budget resolutions that include reconciliation instructions for raising the debt ceiling. These can be discharged immediately for passage on the floor that requires only 51 votes and can't be filibustered by Republicans.
There are two gotchas. The first is a rule that allows 50 hours of debate, which sucks up a vast amount of floor time that could be used for other priorities. The second is a required "vote-a-rama" in which Republicans can offer a theoretically endless set of amendments. In practice, however, since the amendments must be "germane" to the debt ceiling, this puts a limit on how many amendments Republicans can waste time with.
Bottom line: the whole process would have taken 2-3 weeks that Democrats wanted to use for other purposes. That's bad but hardly catastrophic. But this still isn't the real story.
The real story is that the Senate was split 50-50 and Democrats were missing a vote even for reconciliation. I'm sure you can guess whose vote it was:
The administration has determined that if it were to go the reconciliation route on the debt limit, it would face likely opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
....Already, Manchin has expressed reluctance to act on the debt limit with only Democratic votes, though he’s declined to rule it out completely. “I don’t think it should go to reconciliation,” he said Tuesday. “My goodness, it’s something we’ve always worked together on.”
According to Politico at the time, "That’s left White House officials to all but abandon efforts for a lame-duck move they once hoped might head off a potentially disastrous showdown with the House GOP majority next year."
In short, we are now facing a debt ceiling crisis thanks to Joe Manchin. That's it.
That’s absolutely true. But it’s also true that Democrats chose not to put Manchin on the spot so he’d have to own the disaster by voting against reconciliation. This way, Manchin’s obstruction tends to be forgotten or to be vaguely remembered at best. If Manchin wants to obstruct the Democratic agenda, he should be made to do so openly and he should be held accountable.
I like this, but Manchin could change to a Republican at any minute and put Moscow Mitch back behind the gavel. Maybe it's better not to poke that bear?
it’s also true that Democrats chose not to put Manchin on the spot so he’d have to own the disaster by voting against reconciliation...
There's no way to do that. Putting Mancing "on the spot" for obstructing Dem legislation would just make him more popular in West Virginia, a state that went for Trump over Biden by 40 (forty!) points. Punching a Democratic president on the nose is highly popular among WV voters, which is exactly why Machin engages in the practice with such gusto.
(Not that it'll save his hide next year, though. I don't see how he could possibly win another term. WV is just too far gone).
But he could have won re-election by switching to being a Republican, giving Mitch the gavel, and being a hero in WV.
As it is, though, he may get TFG re-elected by running for prez as a third-party in 2024
All true. Not sure running as an independent helps Republicans, though.
My point was only that the /Democratic Party's options with respect to Joe Manchin are basically non-existent. They've long had next to zero leverage. And Manchin knows it.
Thanks for saying this. The DC conventional wisdom is now (a) don't spend time on anything where you already know the outcome; and (b) then rub your forehead vigorously trying to comprehend why voters never understand who's responsible for the fuckups.
My goodness. Either Joe Manchin is stupid (no) or he's playing to the rubes back home, who don't know nuthin' about them "polly ticks" and are unaware of "working together" has too often meant "extortion" by the Republican Party. Also, "everybody knows" that the fedral gummint spends WAY too much: we shouldn't encourage it.
Any read on Sinema Verite's position on the debt ceiling? Is no news good news?
Manchin sucks because most WV voters suck. Dems have to find other ways to boost their Senate numbers: NC, TX, MS, FL, OH, AZ, and one or two others are all more plausible opportunities for Senate gains in future cycles than West Virginia, which is going to have a Republican taking that seat next year, I'm pretty sure.
Yes, going for the states that are turning purple would help. But Repubs made it big by exploiting the "one state, two Senators" schtick, and going for the tiny, no-acccount states. Some of them even have lower population than Washington DC!
DC and Puerto Rico statehood should also be enacted.
She's on the case.
"The debt ceiling fiasco is Joe Manchin’s fault"
That is wrong. It is mainly Trump's fault for pushing the republicans to do it, and then the republican members of the house.
Manchin could have prevented it (maybe), but it is far over the top to say that it is his fault.
If the leaks from the New York Times and Reuters are at all accurate, Biden has won the debt ceiling fight. He's gotten a 2 year extension of the debt limit, along with freezing spending at current, fiscal 2023 numbers. That's just another term for a continuing resolution, which was the best that democrats were going to do in any budget negotiations with this House.
Yeah, that is far better than could have been expected with this batch of loons in the House. If true.
As we amble towards a climate change Armageddon, Kevin is being helpful and historical as points out here and there along the way who and what, step by step, is making it irrecoverable and inevitable. This is one such piece, and it ends as often does, after naming the purblind idiot or action, with the words: "That's it."
"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert..."
If Manchin had been on board, Sinema would have shat on it.
Manchin has pretty much supported McCarthy's position in the negotiations. Democrats need to accept that his only hope of re-election is to be anti-Biden from now until November next year, and stop whining about it.
Time to put more effort into Diane Feinstein, then?
No, the Democrats will retain Feinstein’s seat virtually no matter what. While I don’t care to see my home state taken for granted, and Eisenhower Republicans basically extinct, Democrats are far better served swinging a seat or three elsewhere.
No, Eisenhower Republicans are not extinct. I should know; I'm one of them.
Yet we exert virtually no control over the GOP so the net effect is the same.
Time to inject life into Diane Feinstein.
Machin is probably thrilled that spending cuts are being served up.
Right now wouldn't be the worst time to do federal spending cuts. But, I just think it's barbaric and disgusting to impose work requirements for SNAP, Medicaid, etc.
Even if the US hit the historic low post-WWII unemployment rates of 2.5% in the early 50s, that's still 2.5% of people who can't get a job at the fullest of full employment in US history. Are 2.5% of Americans supposed to suck it up and die?
Even the paternalistic Christian Lutheran work ethic will always fail a percentage of people in the world. Whatever happened to the bullshit conservative claim of "all lives matter" and valuing human life?
Even in late 1944 there was a bit of unemployment (0.9% if memory serves). If we reach 2.5% unemployment, the vast bulk of the jobless will simply be "between jobs" in the benign sense: they're definitionally jobless, sure, but it's not that all "can't find" a job—it's just labor market friction.
We can see that CAR-T hasn’t dampened Kevin’s appetite for The One Person Responsible…
Still, he hasn't said a word about Ken Paxton being impeached by his own party.
Eliminating the debt ceiling through reconciliation in the future might save the country from absolutely tanking. There is basically no way Trumpublicans will ever agree to eliminating it, and it would take a significant political sea change -- and I don't think the reaction to the Dobbs decision is significant enough -- in order for the Trumpublicans to fail to have enough Senators to filibuster anything that can be filibustered.
“When in doubt, draw a distinction.” Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor
Politics is like tug of war . Draw two parallel lines on the ground a certain distance apart and tie a flag halfway along the length of a rope. The left team grabs the left end of the rope, and the right team grabs the right end. The rope is oriented so that it runs perpendicular to the two lines with the flag centered between them. Then the two teams pull in opposite directions.
Joe Manchin is like most people. He forgets that there are lines on the ground and thinks the flag is the center. The line on the Left is the divide between open mindedness and naivete. The line on the Right is the divide between skepticism and cynicism. A real progressive is more open minded and less skeptical. A real conservative is more skeptical and less open minded. A radical is naïve about some ideas and cynical about others.
If you have a real friendship with people on the other team, then you are on the bright side where open mindedness and skepticism are two sides of the same coin. Otherwise, you are on the dark side where the coin’s two sides are cynicism and naivete.
Whether someone is Left or Right is largely irrelevant. Whether they are on the bright side or have gone to the dark side is all that matters in the end.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the debt ceiling fiasco is not Joe Manchin’s fault--it's the fault of the Republicans. Even if we just focus on November/December, as Kevin Drum does, Manchin was one of 51 Senators who were not willing to vote for a reconcilliation bill, so he bears less than 2% of the blame. But even that goes too far, because the debt ceiling wouldn't even be an issue if it weren't for Republicans.
At the risk of stating something that is obvious to me, it is the fault of the people on the dark side, the people that are neither open minded nor skeptical, the people that are both cynical and naïve. Unfortunately, they are in control of the Republican Party. Fortunately, they are not in control of the Democratic Party. But they are in both parties and they are mutual enablers.
Bad is bad. Being bad and insisting that everyone recognize that "they are worse than me" is interpreted as "I like the game, but I don't like it when you win."
"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."
That's why I read Kevin Drum. He's willing to allow the evidence to distinguish between right and wrong. That is the narrow gate, and only a few find it.
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