Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Infrastructure week. at last.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Republicans in disarray!

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Late Night Open Thread: Collapsing the ‘Debt Ceiling’ Threat

Late Night Open Thread: Collapsing the ‘Debt Ceiling’ Threat

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Midnight maneuvers:

This would be (slightly) more entertaining if our whole economy, and the world’s, weren’t being held hostage by the GOP Death Cultists and their plutocrat enablers…



#MoscowMitch begins to suspect the leopards might be willing to eat his face…

… Mr. McConnell has another powerful political incentive for his stance. He cannot control his members, and is reluctant to risk the ire of Republican base voters by leaning on senators to smooth the way for a debt-limit increase. Even if Mr. McConnell wanted to allow one to come to a majority vote, a single senator could stop it. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has made no secret of his presidential ambitions, said on Tuesday that he would block any such agreement — even one to expedite the process that Mr. McConnell is demanding…

How will it end? One option that Mr. Van Hollen said Democrats might have to pursue — and that Mr. Biden on Tuesday called “a real possibility” — is changing the filibuster rules so the borrowing limit increase, and any in the future, could pass with 50 votes.

Mr. King, who has been unenthusiastic about changing the rules, said he had to agree.

“I have been very reluctant for nine years about modifying the filibuster rule, especially when it comes to policy, but this has nothing to do with policy,” he said. “This is about keeping the United States and world out of what could be a severe recession.”

Reader Interactions

24Comments

  1. 1.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    With regard to Psaki, good for her. Mitch needs to be dragged until his turtle shell is completely gone.

  5. 5.

    Steeplejack

    New York Times—“Federal Judge Pauses Strict Texas Law Banning Most Abortions”:

    WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Wednesday granted the Justice Department’s request to halt enforcement of the recently passed Texas law that bans nearly all abortions in the state while the legal battle over the statute makes its way through the federal courts.
    [. . .]
    Judge [Robert L.] Pitman used sharp language to criticize the law, known as Senate Bill 8, which was drafted to make it difficult to challenge in court by delegating enforcement to private individuals, who can sue anyone who performs abortions or “aids and abets” them.
    [. . .]
    Judge Pitman said that through its abortion law, Texas has pursued “an unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”

  6. 6.

    Adam L Silverman

    To answer Jen Psaki’s rhetorical question, the reason McConnell is willing to kick this to December is that it actually gives him more leverage. He’s counting on the following three things:

    1. That the negotiation process for getting the infrastructure as reconciliation bill done will be so toxic that it will actually harden Sinema’s narcissistic chaos agent Heath Ledger’s Joker impression, which will make it even harder for the Democrats to do a simple filibuster revision just for the debt ceiling as she’ll have dug herself in so deep there’s no way that Schumer can get her extricated from her position and lined up in the right direction. He’s also counting on this happening with Manchin too, but since Manchin has a history of grousing and stalling and then doing the right thing when push comes to shove, Sinema is the play.
    2. If the debt ceiling is only waved until December, then when he kills the hostage it is even more traumatic as it will come a few weeks before Christmas. Republican officials and conservative movement leaders and the conservative news and digital media people are already screaming that Biden and Fauci won’t cancel Christmas. If he forces a default before Christmas, the informational foundation has already been laid down to blame the worst Christmas in the US since at least 1941 on Biden and the Democrats.
    3. Finally, he’s counting on Ted Cruz being Ted Cruz. Meaning if Cruz blows up the very narrow opening created by what is being referred to as McConnell blinking, then McConnell will be able to go out and say “It isn’t my fault. We told the Democrats what they had to do, we gave them a simple plan over a month before the default and they refused to even consider it till it was too late. They should have known Cruz would do something like that, which is why I told Senator Schumer and President Biden well in advance that they needed to start reconciliation for the debt ceiling immediately. It is there fault they refused to listen to common sense advice.

    That’s McConnell’s strategy here. That’s McConnell’s play.

    ETA: There’s one other component here, which is McConnell continuing to work the political journalists and pundits to further drive Biden’s negatives up. The goal here is to depress Democratic turnout in the off year state elections this November, as well as turn as many Independents towards the Republicans as possible because they believe things are going in the wrong direction. Virginia’s state elections will be an early indicator as to whether this will work.

  7. 7.

    Adam L Silverman

    @HumboldtBlue: It’s the embedded tweets. If you use a browser like Brave and load this page it will actually give the diagnostics for how many various operations each embedded tweet is trying to run as the page loads. Every time Twitter tweaks their coding it gets worse and worse. And while I have no idea about the company Cole is using as web developers, I do know that this causes significant issues for a number of sites and the developers that work on them.

  9. 9.

    lgerard

    Let’s not ignore the fact that given the number of government workers in VA any shutdown would  bury republicans in the November election.  Better to put it off till right after

  10. 10.

    James E Powell

    A particularly blunt NYT reported piece on McConnell and the debt ceiling, making the case that what he wants is simply chaos

    That’s also what every news organization in America wants. They thrive on this shit.

  11. 11.

    Ruckus

    A particularly blunt NYT reported piece on McConnell and the debt ceiling, making the case that what he wants is simply chaos

    Well it’s about time the FTFNYT actually said something true. He’s not about governing, he’s not about anything good, he’s about power and/or chaos. Now if only a couple of others in the senate supposedly on our side understood that as much as he does, we might be able to make some headway towards an actual country, instead of all the play acting and bullshit.

  12. 12.

    Sloane Ranger

    He cannot control his members, and is reluctant to risk the ire of Republican base voters by leaning on senators to smooth the way for a debt-limit increase

    From what I see and hear from this side of the pond, a certain percentage of Republican voters would actually welcome a global financial meltdown. To their mind this would lead to governmental failure, societal breakdown and Mad Max territory of survival of the fittest. Which, to their minds is them. They’ve got the guns, the militia/survivalist training and the superior genes after all!

  13. 13.

    Ruckus

    @Sloane Ranger:

    They’ve got the guns, the militia/survivalist training and the superior genes after all!

    One out of three isn’t a great start.

    If they had the militia/survivalist training they would be wanting/demanding to be vaccinated so they could survive.

    If they had the superior genes they wouldn’t be acting like 5 yr olds that just lost their lunch money

    Hope you don’t mind that I got in on the snark….

  14. 14.

    Tony Jay

    @Sloane Ranger:

    The Cosplay Conans would be in for a very short, very sharp shock of they ever caught that particular bus.

    “Those aren’t nubile wenches in strategically torn bikinis hanging off your scrawny, hairless legs, genius, those are your soiled camo-flag undies and this, well, this is a rolled up copy of God, Guns and Good Gals. Free postage.”

  17. 17.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Adam L Silverman: 

    The Dems will just include raising the debt ceiling as part of the reconciliation bill they’re currently negotiating. The parliamentarian has already OK’d that. So as long as they can get an intraparty deal on reconciliation within the next four or five weeks (leaving time before December for all the procedural shit the GQP can throw into the gears), it’s clear sailing from there wrt the debt ceiling as well.

  18. 18.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Sloane Ranger: I just saw that Fury Road was back on Netflix here in Europe and couldn’t help but remember how the Mad Max power struggle ended for Immortan Joe.

  20. 20.

    Geminid

    @HumboldtBlue:

     

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR: There’s a new Mad Max in town: Dodger Max Scherzer. I never saw Cardinal Bob Gibson* pitch, but Scherzer is the most intensely competitive pitcher I have seen.

    *Hank Aaron’s advice to rookie Dusty Baker: “Don’t dig in on [Gibson]. He’d knock his own grandmother down if she dug in on him.”

  22. 22.

    Geminid

    @lgerard: Republicans have high hopes for a Youngkin win in this November’s election for Virginia Governor.Youngkin has been running a reletively bland, thematic campaign, trying to put Virginia Democrats to sleep. But trump went on local radio a week ago and called for Youngkin to go “full MAGA.” Now Youngkin has dipped his toes in the MAGA cesspool by calling for another audit of last year’s Virginia election.

  23. 23.

    Edmund Dantes

    Oh shut up King. The budget is all about fucking policy. The political class has just decided to lie about it and make it special so it isn’t part of the “policy” filibuster rules.

    Then self define it out of the policy realm. When a lot of fucking policy is in there.

    How can you spot the lie? 3 words.

    The Hyde Amendment.

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