But first: Betty bait!
See this swim-crazy dog's reaction to a new indoor pool pic.twitter.com/FXyyZaXYUj
— CNN (@CNN) May 28, 2023
Doing my best to summarize what we know but still a lot of outstanding questions. I am still curious exactly what happens on money for domestic programs – including key antipoverty programs https://t.co/eK842Q4PEO
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) May 28, 2023
Gift link, Washington Post: “What’s in the McCarthy-Biden deal to lift the debt ceiling? Here are 6 takeaways.”
Baud
It occurred to me that one of the underappreciated wins for us is the defense budget. Every year, the president sends Congress a sizable defense budget, and every year Congress lards it up with more funding than the president asks for. As I understand it, this deal sets the limit at the president’s request.
NotMax
@Baud
They’ll just lard the black budget all the more.
Baud
@NotMax:
I don’t know what that means.
NotMax
@Baud
Shh, it’s sekrit . Black budget. Many military allocations are highly fungible.
Basilisc
See, Republicans care so little about sound governance that they’re willing to threaten a massive, economically disastrous default to get concessions to their crazy demands. But at the same time they care so little about sound governance that they’re happy to declare victory in exchange for “concessions” that are pretty minor in terms of what the budget actually would’ve looked like otherwise.
Baud
@NotMax:
As I understand it, that budget is separate from the defense budget. The amounts are hidden among the allocation for other appropriations.
OzarkHillbilly
Open thread so, What is a dog, then? On the unbearable death of my dog, Polly
Be ready for a dust storm.
Ken
@NotMax: Heh. The “Black Budget” page has a related link to the Contingency Fund for Foreign Intercourse, which sounds like something Franklin or Jefferson used when they were in Paris.
NotMax
@Baud
Hidden is one thing. Hidden funding can be ferreted out. Those allocations are classified but not separate in the way that word is generally understood., No firewalls, it’s all one big pot o’ moolah.
Ken
@Basilisc: The tricky bit is that McCarthy has agreed to the minor concessions. I am expecting a circus when it comes time for the House to vote, followed by a sideshow as some of the GOP try to remove McCarthy as speaker.
NotMax
Switching gears, weekend long watch.
Who was the first* james Bond on a screen? Would you believe Barry Nelson?
Peter Lorre, shopworn as he was by then, still manages to ooze menace, requisite for a Bond vallain. Also, although it’s in b&w, one can’t shake the impression that on the set Bond was wearing either a (heaven forfend) beige or a maybe a red dinner jacket.
*AFAIK
NotMax
@Ken
Riffing on the old joke, “Three francs, same as downtown.”
:)
Ksmiami
@Ken: lol the Dems have promised to cover the votes to retain Kevin – that’s what holding back the red wave did. The fuckoff caucus can do fuckall
Ten Bears
My second blush holds with my first: Uncle Joe gave the repubescents a way to talk themselves out of the debt-deal corner they had talked themselves into
Mighty generous of him ….
NotMax
#11:
vallain = villain
Ken
@NotMax: I like that version slightly better than the 2006 one with Daniel Craig. Both are infinitely above the 1967 farce, of course.
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly:
Beautiful. So true.
kalakal
@Ken: There are very few films that aren’t better than the 1967 Casino Royale
Spanky
@Ksmiami: Yeah, I think Uncle Joe now owns Kevin. At least it’s pretty to think so. I’m not sure what that’s going to be worth going forward, though.
azlib
The result is not much different than what would happen in a budget negotiation with a divided Congress. The $10B clawback from the IRS funding is basically a rounding error. I do not like the work requirements, but they seem limited. My read is the Freedom Caucus asked for the moon and ended up with a small chunk of space rock.
I do wish the press would present this accurately. The obsession with the debt limit and the bothsiderism is really annoying and misleading.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: Oh, Gawd, I was going to work this morning!
zhena gogolia
@kalakal: Isn’t that the one with Dusty Springfield singing “The Look of Love”?
Yes, it is. That alone makes it a great movie. And Woody Allen has some funny lines.
kalakal
I really can’t work Kevin out. It’s not that he’s an idiot, it’s not that he’s a Republican, it’s that he’s spent years getting to the job he has and doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what to do with it now he has it. He’s patently unfit for this, or any other, job having no leadership or organizational skills and it doesn’t help that he is, to quote Jeeves, mentally negligable
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly:😥😥😥😥
Baud
I’m going to wildly guess that the deal will get a good chunk of GOP support. The caucus probably likes the Freedom Caucus as much as Texas Republicans like Ken Paxton. And while the Freedom Caucus speaks for the base on a lot of issues, the debt limit isn’t something I think the base cares about. So I think they have no real leverage.
The real world card is whether the Freedom caucus will have allies among high level republicans who hate McCarthy.
kalakal
@zhena gogolia: It’s like a bad copy of What’s Up Pussycat? That does have some funny bits in among the mess
oatler
Special carve-out for GOP govs who embezzled Covid funds to jump-start the Civil War.
Baud
@Baud:
World = wild
NotMax
@kalakal
Dunno why but a single absurd line has remained with me from What’s New Pussycat?.
“I suspect the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but they have no motive.”
Baud
@NotMax:
Nominated!
Mousebumples
Thinking of Biden’s questioning the constitutionality of the debt limit – is there a lawsuit he/DOJ could file after this is signed/done to challenge this in the future?
The 2 year break does get us through the the presidential election… And also might be enough time to wind from Federal Court to the Supreme Court…. Maybe?
The Thin Black Duke
James Bond has been left behind by Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt, I think.
JMG
Somebody on Twitter (I forget who) said the Biden-McCarthy deal would not upset the MAGA base that much because it has too much math for them.
Geminid
@Baud: My guess is that McCarthy will be required to deliver more than half the House votes for this bill, with Democrats supplying the rest. Looks like we will find out on Wednesday.
Percysowner
@kalakal:
He’s the dog that caught the car. It looked so good all those years as it roared by, but now he has no clue what to do with it and doesn’t have the ability to manage it anyway.
bbleh
@Baud: @Geminid: along with others, I suspect that part of the deal is that House Dems will go along to the degree necessary with both approving the deal and rejecting a motion to vacate.
And since the Krayzee Kidz Kaucus is pretty much entirely about performance, I would guess it’ll all blow over once they’ve had their tantrum (and raised whatever money they can from it).
The MAJOR thing from my PoV is that it gets the hostage out of the way for 2 years.
Baud
@bbleh:
The two year thing is key. I’m glad they stuck to it.
I’m not sure if the sucky work requirements are also limited to two years.
Percysowner
@Mousebumples: My guess is that since they came to a deal the courts could consider a suit against the Debt Ceiling moot, or at least not yet ripe, because it doesn’t affect anything at this time. Plus with this Supreme Court we can’t be sure they wouldn’t enshrine it as good law, heck they could say not having a Debt Ceiling is unconstitutional, just to screw any Democratic President from here to eternity.
NotMax
@kalakal
Meant to mention a cute moment from a series of history lectures recently watched. The lecturer is himself British, talking in this case about the Norman conquest. Paraphrasing from memory:
“We’ll see how the victory of the Normans brought many positives. Unfortunately teaching the Anglo-Saxons to cook wasn’t one of them. English food remained execrable for the next 900 years.”
The Moar You Know
The victory here is that it gets this horseshit off the table for the 2024 elections. Which helps Dems, period.
bbleh
@Baud: re sucky work requirements, the impression I’ve got from what I’ve read is that they’re neither sweeping nor unusually onerous, which suggests that there may be significant opportunity for various bureaucracies to arrange exceptions and workarounds and so forth. This would achieve both parties’ goals: performative poor-bashing but not as much actual additional misery as many in the Republican base would prefer.
The determined nastiness of those people never ceases to amaze me …
Nora
@Percysowner: Moot? Ripe? With THIS Supreme Court? Those words have no more meaning than standing with this lot.
Once the courts took those concepts seriously. Now, this bunch of anarchists ignores any technical rules if they would stand in the way of letting them destroy things they don’t like.
I wish I were exaggerating.
Betty Cracker
Wow, a water-loving Boston! So cute!
Mike in NC
Pouring rain here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Highlight of the day might be lunch at the ritzy Grove Park Inn. Heading back to the beach in the morning after we figure a less painful route than the one that got us here.
Geminid
@bbleh: I believe Biden will win reelection (and Democrats will win the House) as long as the economy is good. This deal removes a major roadblock to that end, and I think that is why President Biden chose to make this deal.
While there are dissenters among people (mainly non-electeds) on the Left, Democrats will come out of this fairly united, I think.
Not so the Republicans. This deal exposes and aggravates their party’s stress points, and I think it will dog them into next year.
Betty Cracker
I think Josh Marshall’s take is about right. He says if the deal holds, the concessions are about what you’d expect in a regular budget negotiation, which isn’t the outcome bad guys want from a hostage-taking scenario:
bbleh
@Percysowner: @Mousebumples: I was wondering about that. Biden made some remark about there not being enough time to litigate it this time around, but maybe a case could be made by someone like Yellen that she is presently and persistently injured by significant limitations on her ability to fulfill her responsibilities imposed by the existence of the limit, even if catastrophe isn’t imminent.
Baud
@Geminid:
I hope Dems figure out how to make the debt ceiling law part of the budget so there can be no more hostage taking.
Percysowner
@Nora: I agree the court has zero interest in actual rules, but if they don’t want to enshrine this in law forever AND don’t want to overturn it, so it can be used as a hostage situations in the future, they have a legal out.
@Baud:
Well they have to get someone to balance Manchin and Sinema, so good luck on that!
bbleh
@Geminid: Concur on all points. The elephant in the room — which Biden himself mentioned in a speech in Japan — was the state of the economy going into ’24. That alone was worth some concessions imo. And yeah nothing is done til the ink is dry, but I’m surprised at how little it seems the Dems really had to concede, which may be due to the fissures among the Reps that you mention.
I think the tricky part in ’24 will be the Senate. The calendar is stacked somewhat against the Dems. But the Reps are doing a very good job painting themselves into a tighter and tighter corner, so …
The Thin Black Duke
@Baud: That happens once the Democrats get the House, Senate and the Presidency again.
Shalimar
@Ksmiami: Dems don’t even have to vote for McCarthy for him to remain Speaker. If they all abstain from the no confidence vote, McCarthy wins and keeps his job for another 18 months. The size of his opposition is unknown but no way in hell is it more than 111 votes.
sdhays
@azlib: This is my takeaway too. Though there are concessions, the Republicans got absolutely nothing from including the debt limit. What they did get, they got from having a thin majority in one House of Congress, which is how it’s supposed to work.
Betty Cracker
From Twitter, a nervous, sweaty McCarthy selling this deal on Fox News Sunday:
We’re at essentially full employment, so the “get America working again” framing is bullshit. But the last part sounds suspiciously like the truth coming from that lying toe-rag…
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
ok, that’s just weird.
Ksmiami
@kalakal: in fairness though, the GOP is rudderless, has no policy or vision, and exists only to induce resentment rage.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: That’s exactly how McQarthy lost his chance to be Speaker the first time around.
Anne Laurie
Looks like that Boston’s got the ginger gene. Don’t know if the prejudice still exists, but when I was hanging out with people who bred dogs for conformation showing and/or performance, the stereotype was that ‘red’ dogs (chocolate labs, Irish setters, goldens — a breed developed from ‘defective’ flat-coat retrievers — etc) of any breed were all a little hyper / crazy.
(Yes, I *am* — was — a redhead, why do you ask?)
Chief Oshkosh
@azlib:
Sounds more like they got a small, moldy chunk of cheese-food product.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
As a Republican operative once said, the Republican base is made up of a bunch of reprogrammable meat bags. They’ll care about what they’re told to care about. Right now, nobody on the level of Trump or Tucker is telling them to get riled up enough to interrupt their normal program of sucking in good air and sucking down shitty beer (but not Bud Light!!!) over Memorial Day Weekend, a program that never, ever includes thinking one nanosecond about those who died while in service.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
People get distracted by the mattress deals.
Mousebumples
@bbleh: Good point. We’ll see where this goes. (or I wonder if anyone could claim to be “harmed” by Treasury trickery that delayed the debt limit being reached could file something? 🤷♀️)
Betty Cracker
@Anne Laurie: Hahaha, never heard that theory before.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Looks to me like McCarthy traded the debt ceiling for D support in keeping his leadership.
Anne Laurie
Also: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld prejudice about ‘dogs with orange eyebrows’. (In other words, ‘tricolor’ dogs carrying the semi-recessive ginger gene.)
clay
They asked for the moon and McCarthy showed them his ass.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
kalakal
@Anne Laurie: I can confidently state that every Red Setter I have ever known has been 100% loopy. Georgous, lovely personalities, mad as a box of frogs the lot of them.
Hasn’t applied to cats though.
@NotMax:
😂😂😂
That’s what happens when you blend Viking and Saxon cuisine.
kalakal
@azlib:
They got a bag of gravel
Another Scott
@Percysowner: True.
Maybe he can have the Office of Legal Counsel draw up a memo…
:-/
But since he said that he hopes that the courts will look at the 14th, he must have gamed this out.
Dunno.
Cheers,
Scott.
SFAW
@Chief Oshkosh:
Well, since the moon is made of green cheese*, maybe they did get the moon.
* OK, purists/pedants among you (e.g., NotMax, SteveInTheWTFKW?) will note that it’s actually made of molecules**
** Reference to a really old, obscure Yellow Pages commercial.
brantl
@Baud: Very occasionally, McQarthy had Truth-teller’s Tourette’s Syndrome.
zhena gogolia
@kalakal: Which is the one where Woody Allen is going to be killed by a firing squad? Maybe that’s What’s New, Pussycat. That’s what I’m thinking of. He says, “I have a very low threshhold of death.”
Jackie
@Betty Cracker: Thor sounds like a squeak toy every time he hits the water😂🥰
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: 😂
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia: That would be Casino Royale, right at the beginning.
ETA: Don’t forget it had all that Bacharach.
Miss Bianca
@kalakal: OK, “mad as a box of frogs” has now entered my personal lexicon. Thanks for that!
Oh, and I was sorry to have to miss your Zoom chat last week. Any chance it got recorded?
Eolirin
@bbleh: If we can hold Ohio and especially Montana, I think we narrowly pull it out.
But I have no idea if we can hold both.
We really needed Wisconsin in the midterms, and North Carolina would have been nice. We keep getting so close and falling just short of where we need to be.
zhena gogolia
Finally watched the video of the dog — hahaha!
PaulB
Per the Huffington Post:
I dunno…. seems to me like the damage is pretty minimal (although horrible for those affected), and in return, he got an even larger mitigation of damage in other areas, yielding a net positive outcome.
Overall, I’m torn. I really, really, REALLY hate that there was any negotiation at all. Emboldening the terrorists, ensuring that this will happen again a couple of years down the road, etc. On the other hand, if the deal is as portrayed and if it passes, this is, overall, a much better outcome than I feared.
As for litigation, I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect that litigating the 14th Amendment would suffer from the issue of now being moot and the lack of standing. On the other hand, I could definitely see the platinum coin or the special bonds solutions being implemented and subsequently litigated, since neither of those depend on waiting for a hostage situation. I have no idea what the Supreme Court would do in either case.
Eolirin
@PaulB: With this outcome I don’t think the terrorists are going to be emboldened. I expect the bomb throwers to view this as a massive betrayal.
I doubt they’ll realize this, but because McCarthy knew this needed to pass and couldn’t get something out of his own caucus that could Democrats had all the leverage in negotiations, and we managed to win massive concessions on the next fight that we wouldn’t have gotten with just a clean bill.
The crazy caucus will keep trying to take it hostage as long as it exists because they want a default. But this isn’t actually working out for them. Just like the Trump budget negotiations would tend to break more in our favor than they should have. They don’t have the votes for anything without our help.
kalakal
@Miss Bianca: I believe it did, I’ll ask Watergirl about when it will go up.
I enjoyed it despite a load of technical glitches at the beginning, it’s only the 2nd time I’ve ever done a zoom ( not in person) talk. It’s a bit weird as you don’t get any feedback while you do it. There was a nice discussion at the end too
Jinchi
How is this a win? This has been business as usual for as long as I’ve been alive. Republicans always exempt defense from their demands for budget cuts. I doubt Biden had to twist any arms here.
It really just underscores the disingenuousness of the fiscal conservatives when even their ‘cut spending or else’ demands include increased money for the military.
Eolirin
@Jinchi: The win is that the increase is capped. And at a relatively low number.
Baud
@Jinchi:
Did you not read the rest of my comment?
ETA: Agree that the fiscal conservatives are hypocrites.
YY_Sima Qian
I think we can all be relieved that the Dems did not have to make some painful concessions this time around, unlike the 10-year sequester. However, repeatedly negotiating over raising the debt ceiling simply legitimizes the GOP tactic of holding the national & global economy hostage. A couple of more rounds & the MSM will treat such negotiations as “institutionalized” & part of “normal process of governance”. Their focus will then be on why aren’t the Dems giving in to avert economic calamity, as opposed to why are the GOP taking hostages.
I posted the following in Adam’s daily Ukraine thread, I will post it here, too:
mrmoshpotato
@SFAW: If the Moon were made of cheese, would you eat it?
Eolirin
@YY_Sima Qian: The solution is to win the legislature back with enough votes to repeal it. Which we can’t do if the economy gets blown up.
These analyses ignore that the US electorate is subject to media channels that are outside of the influence of the Democratic party and are actively hostile to its success. We need to win electorally, and that means operating within the information channel constraints we have, not the ones we wish we had.
kalakal
@mrmoshpotato:
Wallace & Gromit would
A Grand Day Out
YY_Sima Qian
@Jinchi:
@Baud:
@Eolirin:
The 10-yer sequester negotiated by Obama constrained defense spending, as well, much more so. Given how much the US spends on the military, crowding out both domestic welfare & investment, & foreign diplomacy & aid, this was not the worst outcome. However, the budge constraints imposed by the sequester did not result in procurement discipline by the DOD, did not rein in the MIC, did not slow the militarization of US foreign policy, & did not really restrain the employment of deadly force by the US overseas. Instead, the impact of the budgetary constraints were felt in recruitment/retention, maintenance, & stockpiling of munitions, which adversely affected readiness in all of the services of the US military.
Tony G
So, yes, taking the economy as a hostage leads to concessions (i.e., imposing pain on the the most vulnerable people in the country), and it therefore does work as a tactic that will inevitably be used again in the near future. But, this lousy agreement was probably the best that Biden could have had, given the fact, that the electorate in gerrymandered congressional districts saw fit to hand control of the House to the GOP last fall. This is lousy, but it’s probably the best that was possible — unless the “Freedom Caucus” decides to blow it up and cause a default anyway.
mrmoshpotato
@kalakal: YUMM-O!
UncleEbeneezer
@The Thin Black Duke: As someone who just watched MI2 for the first time; NO!, lol. I understand that the MI films get batter and the last couple are supposedly great, but so far, Daniel Craig Bond films >>> MI films. I think part of it is that we still love the Brittish charm and Bond traditions more than the cocky, American style of the MI movies and Cruise’s personality in general. Never checked out a Bourne film because I’m not a big Matt Damon fan.
Westyny
@Mike in NC: We could use some of that rain in the Hudson Valley.
Walker
@The Thin Black Duke: Bourne is very, very much a product of (and commentary) on the Bush years. Attempts to bring it back post Bush have been less than successful.
Layer8Problem
@Westyny: Yeah, I’m not seeing any obvious precipitation over the next ten days at this end of it.
karen marie
What happened to “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”?
It’s really disheartening that Biden is going along with this.
Delk
the Freedom Caucus asked for the moon and ended up with a small chunk of
space rockspacex launch pad debris.Edmund dantes
@bbleh: oh come the fuck on. This shit is administered by the states. And you think it won’t be too onerous? I live in a blue state, and due to a recent layoff I’m jumping through all the hoops for unemployment. It’s a fair amount of work involved just keeping a running tally of my “looking for work”, not to mention the “you need to go to this generic career fair” (which won’t have a lot for my type of work), you need to do these interview trainings (insanely basic stuff), etc. This is all work that has to be done on top of my normal job hunt stuff and just the normal day to day of not going crazy applying for all the jobs and then tracking the failures. It’s a good think I’m already in therapy for other stuff, cause this non onerous stuff has a tendency to resurface stuff .
so let’s not just sweep the work requirements stuff under the “bureaucrats in the states will make it really not onerous at all” rug.
Betty Cracker
What the actual fuck?
Does he want his own caucus to punt him into the sun?
Matt McIrvin
@bbleh: What we need is a legislative majority that can get rid of it, but Manchin and Sinema wouldn’t hear of it last time, so we can’t even get a simple majority, let alone one that could get past the auto-filibuster.
The whole idea of considering it a nod to “bipartisanship” to give a minority an opportunity for this kind of terrorism really underscores the absurdity of that kind of attitude.
Matt
My cynical predictions:
The people who think this means the hostage negotiation over the budget is over are the kind of suckers who think that Lucy will definitely not pull the football away this time.
Edmund dantes
@PaulB: this is the right take of the work requirements. They are going to suck ass for those subjected to them. But the deal is okay. Not this hand waving away of maybe they won’t be so bad.
kindness
I don’t think can take the House in ’24. Too much gerrymandering. But the Senate is ours. Democrats need to just keep pounding abortion as it turns out even most Republicans support a woman’s right to get one.
Me, I’m hoping for a Senate with 54 Democrats. It won’t contain Manchin or Sinema as they’ll both lose big. We lose the W. Virginia seat but will gain an actual Democrat in AZ.
Betty Cracker
@karen marie: I think what happened is Biden & Co. figured negotiating with terrorists this year would be less harmful to Dems’ near-term political prospects than letting Repubs destabilize the economy. I was in favor of calling the Repubs’ bluff too, but since Dems chose the other option, I’m glad they got a least-harm type of deal (if it holds).
YY_Sima Qian
@Eolirin: I am not suggesting that Biden or Dems did anything wrong at this moment. The US & the world clearly cannot afford a US default in the coming weeks. The Dems did the best they could given the immediate circumstances.
However, I would not call this a victory, & it is a tactical one at best even if we could call it a victory. I am not seeing much of a Dem strategy to counter the persistent GOP strategy of subversion (as Adam L. Silverman correctly characterizes it). Through the decades, the Dems have become skilled at reducing the damage the GOP can wreak at any given moment, & partially repairing the damage when they are in position to do so. OTOH, they have not been nearly as effective in defeating the long term GOP effort in shifting the Overton Window of acceptable discourse in a multitude of public policy arenas.
Just winning the next election is not enough, it is almost always campaign season in the US these days. The Dems held the WH & narrow majorities coming out of the 2022 election, did not do anything to repeal the debt ceiling. If you are hoping for Ds holding strong majorities in both chambers of Congress + the WH (as following the 2008 elections), that could be long time in coming. Even if they do manage such a feat, there will be a million legislative priorities, many aimed at repairing the enormous damage caused during GOP time in power (see 2009 – 2010). How many Dems would want to spend political capital to repeal the debt ceiling, fearing being demagogued as “fiscally irresponsible”.
To govern effectively, Dems need to get over the fear of being demagogued by the GOP or the MSM: on the debt ceiling, on “fiscal responsibility”, on social welfare, on national security/foreign policy (including on China). They need to start attempting to shift the framing around the debt ceiling, emphasizing that it is an anachronism that should never have been enacted in the 1st place. Don’t try to sell the “successful” negotiations on “bipartisanship compromise” grounds, of the two parties “coming together” to avert crisis. Maintain disciplined message that any negotiation to raise the debt ceiling is just Ds trying to prevent the Rs from shooting the hostages (that being the truth), & make it explicitly part of the D’s platform to remove hostages that Rs can attempt to take, & prevent Rs from being in position to take hostages – “Never Again” & mean it. Maintain that message discipline for the long term.
And/or start shaping the discursive battlefield environment to invoke the 14th Amendment the next time the GOP tries to take this hostage again.
Biden’s message (& Obama’s back then) of “compromise” only serves to legitimize the GOP’s hostage taking.
Betty Cracker
@Matt:
I have no idea if this deal will even go down, but my understanding is that if it does in the terms outlined in the media, Repubs won’t get a chance to shut the government down this fall because the deal covers it. And even if they did, it would be stupid because they’d rightly get the blame.
kalakal
@Betty Cracker: Wow!
I think he’s going for the “I am a statesman, me” image.
That or he’s finally realised he’s screwed no matter what he does and that the people he really, really hates are the “Freedom Caucus” nutjobs so go MAD on them
YY_Sima Qian
@Betty Cracker:
That’s what the Dems thought when Obama negotiated the 10-year sequester, & Obama did win reelection in 2012. However, continuously reaching least harm type of deals will not defeat the reactionary GOP.
Betty Cracker
@YY_Sima Qian: Excellent take. IMO, catastrophizing and triumphalism are both inappropriate responses to what is unfolding.
zhena gogolia
@karen marie: What do you propose he do, given that the Republicans control the House of Representatives?
Frankensteinbeck
@YY_Sima Qian:
The way it played out, they got absolutely nothing for the debt ceiling. This was a budget negotiation, and the debt ceiling got taken completely off the table. I don’t think they’re going to be emboldened by this one.
Betty Cracker
@YY_Sima Qian: One quibble: I wouldn’t compare the current deal to the sequester agreement. The latter was Dems getting rolled. The current is trying to make the best of a bad situation, but I agree with what you said at #107 regarding the long-term harm.
Another Scott
@YY_Sima Qian: As long as the monsters have a majority in one or both houses of Congress, we have to deal with them. The only way to truly defeat them is to make sure they don’t have the majority so that they’re not able to make demands in the first place.
Being able to point to moderation and keeping the ship of state moving forward helps win the normies in the next election.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: I think a reduction or even just a freeze in the Defense budget in this decade is unlikely. The US’s various allies are in the process of building out their militaries, so maybe by 2030 we can start reducing the defense share of GDP to 4% or below. That’s if there are no more major wars between now and then, which I think is a possibility but definitely not a certainty.
I don’t see a political consensus for defense cuts developing before then. Military industry companies are well-organized, and they make sure that the localities and states where they operate are well aware of their economic impact. It will be hard for defense budget-hawks to overcome that influence.
My best hope is that military expenditures will decline as a share of GDP, not because it’s being cut in real terms but because growth in the rest of the economy outstrips defense spending.
Frankensteinbeck
@Geminid:
I don’t think there’s any will to reduce the defense budget. Some folks would like it, but almost no one really cares enough to push. Meanwhile, a fat chunk of people care enough to push to expand it.
YY_Sima Qian
@Frankensteinbeck:
Never underestimate the nihilism of the GOP. They didn’t get much this time because McCarthy is an extraordinarily weak speaker known to be not in control of his caucus (much weaker than John Boehner). That will not always be the case in the future.
Even so, they got Dems to make concessions that will hurt people, even if the concessions are less than feared. I am not convinced that the GOP will play at the ballot for this episode. It will be forgotten by Nov. 2024, precisely because this deal pushes the debt ceiling beyond the next election.
Legitimizing hostage taking creates a problem in perpetuity, until it is solved one way or another.
Frankensteinbeck
@YY_Sima Qian:
The Dems made a budget negotiation that turned out far better than we would normally expect with Republicans controlling the House. There is no way to avoid negotiating that. None. And Republicans hold the upper hand. Instead of getting to hold the debt ceiling hostage for major cuts, the debt ceiling got rolled into negotiating the one thing we would have to negotiate anyway, and they got nothing for it.
Not that they won’t keep trying again. They probably will because they’re assholes and having had the idea once, they’ll keep trying it regardless of results.
Geminid
@Matt: One of your key predictions is that Democrats will supply the majority of votes for this bill. That one is worth marking. We’ll find out Wednesday.
I don’t think Democrats will, and if McCarthy can’t, I think Democrats still might not. This could be very suspenseful Wednesday.
Brachiator
I am pissed about the debt limit negotiations. Biden should not have given the Republicans a goddam thing.
I don’t give a shit about any spirit of compromise or bipartisanship.
Biden did not have to do this. He certainly did not have to give McCarthy any kind of victory.
There better be something substantial down the road for the Democrats.
YY_Sima Qian
@Another Scott:
At the cost of normalizing GOP hostage taking to the normies. After all, it is just a tactic for budget negotiations, even though it is well outside of the normal budget process, & holding national/global economy as hostage. It helps to prevent the low information/low attention span normies from seeing the GOP as the monsters that they are, to the detriment of effort to prevent the GOP from achieving majorities.
Another Scott
The noise last night was that McCarthy’s people were going to write the text and send to over to Biden for his final checks before publishing it.
I don’t see it on docs.house.gov/floor/ yet, but presumably it will show up there in the next day or few. (The government web pages seem to be updated slower than the in-the-know spots that the plugged in reporters can find – but rarely link to for us dirty hippies.)
We’ll see the details soon enough, if they’re serious about the “72 hours to read it before the vote” stuff.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
@YY_Sima Qian:
Years too late for that. Whatever any individual thinks about it, everyone already knows the Republicans pull shit like this every chance they get.
azlib
As Barney Frank said, the Republicans believe in weaponized Keynesian economics.
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid:
I think the debt ceiling deal does in fact modestly cuts US “defense” spending, in real terms, as the budgeted increase falls well short of expected inflation. I agree there is no appetite to cut “defense” spending in nominal terms, possibly ever, unless there is a dire budgetary crisis.
Here is the thing, though: even as the US is ramping up Great Power Competition w/ China, China is still spending only 1.7 – 1.9% on national “defense” (best estimates by SIPRI & others on an apples to apples basis to other countries, China’s official “defense” budget is only 1.2% of GDP), & its “defense” spending increases have largely tracked nominal GDP growth since the late 90s. As the US & allies seek to increase spending on their militaries in the coming years (as shares of GDP & of national budgets), they are doing so in an environment of slowing global growth (same for China), higher structural inflation & interest rates (not true so far for China), deteriorating domestic infrastructure (not true for China), & demographic decline (sometimes worse than China’s well covered challenges). Their budgets will be stressed by demands for domestic welfare & investment (same for China), not to mention rising interest payments on national debt. OTOH, China is still spending less on its military as percentage of GDP than the US & many of its allies, & less than the 2% that the other allies are at least claiming to target. A dollar of “defense” spending will also go farther in China than in the US & most allies.
Case in point is Japan: it is aiming to double its “defense” budget to 2% of GDP. However, in 2022 the JSDF’s recruit was only 50% of target. Its force is rapidly aging, it is having a hard time filling out existing Orders of Battle, let alone expanding the JSDF’s OrBat. Most of the increase in “defense” spending will likely have to go into personnel retention, just to sustain its current force structure.
The US incentivized the USSR to spend itself into bankruptcy during the Cold War. One should not assume the US & allies will be able to do the same to China this time around, the dynamic may in fact be the opposite. The US policymakers should seriously rethink whether the myopic focus on the military balance in the Pacific is the best way to go about the Great Power Competition w/ China.
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: There is nothing in this agreement that bars Democrats from making Republican recklessness regarding default an issue in next year’s elections.
And it doesn’t shield Republicans from political consequences of the bill they passed. For instance, voters in the VA. 2nd CD are going to hear a lot about her vote to cut VA spending by 22%. She can say, “That was a bargaining chip, we never intended to actually cut it;” then her opponent (and I hope it’s Elaine Luria) can look into the TV cameras and promise the many active and retired military person in the 2nd that she will never, ever use their and their families wellbeing as a bargaining chip.
I see the resolution of this debt ceiling matter as the beginning of the 2024 election. It is shaping the battlefield, so to speak, for the main battle Democrats will fight in the Fall of 2024. A strong economy is key to winning that, and this puts a big stumbling block out of the way. So I think this is a good deal in pragmatic terms
Brachiator
@YY_Sima Qian:
I don’t see the point of military competition with China, although I see that there are people in the West who always need a Great Adversary.
But I also don’t see the point in the build up of the Chinese military. Apart from ego.
And you are right, I don’t see China going bankrupt trying to keep up or surpass the US.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
The GOP gets to play up the idea that Democrats are inherently spendthrifts and that the Republicans are inherently the party of fiscal restraint. Biden has given the GOP something for every one of their bullshit talking points.
YY_Sima Qian
@Brachiator: China’s problem is that it has been spending more on internal security than national “defense”, presumably higher than most countries.
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: The US isn’t going to make China spend itself into bankruptcy, but I don’t think the US and its allies will either. I think defense spending at this level is sustainable without damaging the overall economy.
But I may be biased here, because I live in a state that is awash in national defense dollars.
Miss Bianca
@Brachiator: I have no doubt that *you* would have resolved everything handily – your experience in federal sausage-making with a GOP full of Sweeney Todds being so much greater than President Biden’s, after all.
Geminid
@Brachiator: This deal doesn’t give Republican any talking points they have not used before, incessantly. And it gives Democrats plenty of good, new talking points for next year’s election.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: If the young folks in my life are representative of their generation, they see high military spending as a roadblock to their priorities, which include more spending on healthcare, education, climate change mitigation, etc. I think they’re right, and when it’s their turn to lead, priorities will change.
Eolirin
@YY_Sima Qian: This is the point where you’ve lost the dynamics. There’s no way to message to low information voters, and there’s no way to message to right wing media listening voters that will actually reach them.
If we defaulted because we were consistent and unyeilding in our rejection of any negotiation half the country would blame Biden and the Democrats. There’s no way to make almost half of the electorate see the Republicans as monsters when it comes to this issue. The outcome you’re looking for there requires our news media channels being at least neutral. We do not have that.
What people would notice is that things started breaking, and they’d blame Biden because they don’t even know how separation of power works. Meanwhile even the more neutral seeming major media channels would be going on about how this is all the Democrats’ fault for not entering into negotiations.
The only way to get rid of this is to have enough Democratic wins in elections to defuse it either legislatively or through regaining control of the courts. That’s require that we keep kicking the can down the road, because we’ve already lost the messaging channels and can’t get them back. Any tactic that is dependent on reporting to drive a change in public opinion is going to fail. And no one here really cares about this shit except if it goes wrong. This isn’t like guns or abortion rights.
If your goal is to make these people seem like irresponsible monsters the only way you’re going to do that is by actually defaulting. And half of them will blame us anyway.
artem1s
@Frankensteinbeck:
no matter the Eeyore whinging about how Biden (Obama, Clinton etc) failed us again with their neocon compromises, the Rethug Moneybags have made it clear that Qevin isn’t allowed to let the wingnut arm of the GQP MAGAt fulfill their wet dream fantasy of defaulting on the national debt. It’s an empty threat. They didn’t even cross the Newt shut down line this time. the real threat now is that Berners and Rose Twitter keep banging the drum to boycott the elections. The MSM will try to sell another Red Wave too. So we’re not out of the woods yet, but burning it all down so the ‘one weird trick’ crowd can fulfill their wet dream fantasy isn’t any guarantee it will work and it most certainly will crash the economy.
Brachiator
@Eolirin:
Previously, most people properly blamed the Republicans when they pulled any stopping the federal government bullshit.
There was no reason to give in to the GOP on this.
JaySinWA
@Betty Cracker: In fairness to McCarthy it was “get America working again” not Americans, and it was in reference to reducing the time to review highway proposals. Sort of a fixing the “Seattle process” argument. The cut away to the beaming Fox interviewer was weird.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I wonder how salient an issue military spending will be for that group. Framing military spending as crowding out social spending and climate mitigation certainly makes for a persuasive argument, but at least with climate mitigation, we’re seeing a huge increase of investments in clean energy with military spending unchanged.
As for social spending for programs like universal pre-K, free community college, higher income support for households with children, etc., the money is there if we summon the will to squeeze more dollars out of the wealthy and the high earners. Politically, that would be easier to do than cutting the defense budget by 10%, 20% or more.
Geminid
@Brachiator: I question whether the political consequences of past government shutdowns is relevant here. Government shutdowns caused more inconvenience than economic dislocation. The potential damage of a default is much greater, both for economy generally and for the Biden administration.
taumaturgo
@Eolirin:
“Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be … We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
~ Gore Vidal
Brachiator
@Geminid:
I don’t believe that the Republicans would have let the default happen.
Really? Name a few.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: We spend an absolutely absurd amount on the military, and cutting it significantly could be a game changer.
Gvg
@azlib: if they presented it accurately, as in the republicans got tiny tiny bits of fluff, the crazies would certainly tank the deal and probably even the so called responsible republicans. The only way this passes is if the republicans sell it to themselves as a victory and the democratic Congress people quietly say to themselves only and not the press, it’s not too bad pass it quick.
Then after it has passed and been signed we and the press and on line influencers and campaign supporters can gradually change the sTory to this was a really good deal and Biden and the Dems were good negotiators. The closer to elections more about how horrible the republicans are.
I have been worried because I felt that far to many of the republicans, not just the officially crazy ones, but all of them seemed to really want the default. They were upping the demands unrealisticly and had no official demands…and didn’t seem to understand why they shouldn’t default. They seemed stupid, so I was worried.
Geminid
@Brachiator: Every spending cut Republicans went on record voting for is a potential talking point, some better than others. For instance, voters will hear a lot about the proposed VA cuts. That one will be hard to live down.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: OTOH, one can point to things like planes not being able to fly because of lack of spare parts, ships crashing because of understaffing and lack of sleep, ships under renovation being burned to a hulk because of lack of workers and oversight, it taking 2 years to ramp up 155 mm shell production, letting environmental disasters at military bases fester for decades because of lack of funding to clean them up, being unwilling to pay for adequate heath care (especially PTSD treatments) for people coming back from war zones, etc., etc.
Cutting the military has consequences.
The basic problem, IMHO, is that Congress wants the military to do too much, but is much more interested in paying for fancy weapons systems which take decades to develop and build-out** than in taking care of people and maintaining and sustaining what we already have. There’s not a large enough organized constituency for that stuff…
:-(
But beyond that, the federal government overall has been strangled for funding most of the time since January 1980.
Google tells me that the average OECD government spending is 40.8% of GDP. For the USA, it was 24.6% in 2022.
tl;dr – One has to look at what the DoD is being asked to do before saying that giant cuts are possible or desirable.
** – There are consequences for cutting fancy fighter systems too, because training, and continuous flight operations to keep skills sharp, and spare parts, and gas-guzzler CO2 spewing old engine technology, and all the rest, means having multiple kinds of old fighters around is expensive, too.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: A 20% cut in defense spending would yield $200 billion a year, less the tax dollars lost from the places where it’s spent. As a practical matter, it would be easier to get that money by increasing tax revenues, and also less potentially disruptive.
Another Scott
@Another Scott:
… since January
19801981.Cheers,
Scott.
Gvg
@Brachiator: yeah there was. We can’t undefault. The damage is too high and too permanent to the financial security of the current people and future generations. Most people just have no idea how valuable the security based on our economy and political stability is. It makes everything cheaper for us than elsewhere because the cost of money is lower. Plenty of things are higher costs but money actually isn’t and that impact everything. We don’t notice that cecause we have always had it, like air. Most people think it’s natural, but it isn’t it came from effort of prior American generations and we can’t throw it away.
The republicans do seem to know diddly about money and how it really works. Didn’t used think I would be thinking that but it’s true. We have to negotiate with them because they don’t even understand they are playing with a bomb. A lot of the public doesn’t either. And if we let the bomb go off, we’d be blamed by enough to keep us from being able to fix it. We’d end up with an austerity government that would make it worse (like Wilson)
bbleh
@Betty Cracker: yes, my understanding also is that it punts on the necessity of passing individual spending bills by specifying funding levels that will hold if those bills aren’t passed
@YY_Sima Qian: I wouldn’t count on making “the debt limit” the center of any political strategy. The vast majority don’t know what it is, don’t know what “default” means, and don’t have any understanding of the consequences of default (or near default). It’s all Washington number-cruncher gobbledygook. Even the Republicans didn’t talk about the debt limit; they talked about “spending” (specifically Nice White People’s money on lazy Inner City types and Illegal Immigrants and who said anything about race?) It has to be about the budget, about what we actually spend money on, and maybe as a side about “hostage-taking,” cuz that sounds bad and people sorta know what it is. Republicans are taking money away from rural hospitals and giving it to billionaires and big corporations. That kind of thing
@Geminid: concur. The military-industrial complex unfortunately is too deeply wired to confront it head-on. It’s become sort of a semi-permanent Keynesian stimulus, except the multiplier effect of military-industrial dollars is about the lowest of any federal spending.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@kalakal: going viking is a job, not a people
@UncleEbeneezer: they get MUCH better. the second is the worst.
Jackie
@taumaturgo: Repealing Roe changed that. Seriously restricting women’s healthcare changed that. Banning books changed that. Attacking LBGTQ rights changed that.
Voters will remember, as nothing can change until Dems retake the House, hold the Senate and vote to keep *that nice man* in the White House.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: The younger generation may well end up cutting defense spending, but I think that will not happen until the next decade. By then, what’s now 5% of GDP might be 3.5% of GDP and falling, and defence cuts might not seem so important.
@Betty Cracker:
Betty Cracker
@JaySinWA: As released by McCarthy today:
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Por que no los dos? 🤷♀️
Chris T.
@Nora:
It’s easy: they’re originalists, and they simply interpret the blank spaces / kerning in the original text in the correct way. For instance:
SCALIA: As we see from the spacing on this page, the original intention was that Bitcoin was the only valid US currency…
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: We can do both. We just don’t need to.
Chris T.
@Anne Laurie:
Ah, another ginger! Must see / hear: Prejudice, by Tim Minchin
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: Is that what they’re calling this? “The Fiscal Responsibility Act”?
Jesus wept.
Brit in Chicago
@kindness: I really hope you’re right, but I doubt it. Please show your work!
Eolirin
@Brit in Chicago: The opposite is more likely to happen. If we lose Manchin we need to hold Montana and Ohio and win in Arizona just to stay at 50. Montana in particular is going to be a heavy lift. Our only pickup opportunities this cycle are Texas and Florida. In an amazing year where everything goes wrong for the Republicans we can at most get to 53, and that’s holding Manchin’s seat and winning both Texas and Florida.
With NY looking like it may have more favorable maps and with a number of winnable seats in CA and AZ we may be able up pull off flipping the house even with the maps in Ohio and NC possibly getting worse.
El Muneco
@Eolirin: We lost the House this time around in no small part because the state organizations in both NY and CA fell asleep at the wheel and allowed basically the 95th – 99th percentile worst realistically possible outcomes to happen. They won’t make the same mistake again.
And, of course, the first midterm after a party takes the Presidency is usually a major course adjustment, while an incumbent’s re-election campaign election is usually the opposite.
Depending on how much Dobbs has shifted the generic ballot, we might even be favored to retake the House.