After a debt limit negotiating session at the White House this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy returned to the Capitol and offered reporters an update.
“Let me be very clear,” he said. “From the first day I sat with the president, there’s two criterias I told him,” McCarthy said, raising two fingers. “We’re not going to raise taxes because we bring in more money than we ever have. And we’re not going to pass a clean debt ceiling. And we’ve got to spend less than we spent this year.”
Let me be very clear, Mr. Speaker. Those are three, er, “criterias.”
This might be the most worrying aspect of the default standoff: The full faith and credit of the United States hangs in the balance, and the man sitting across the negotiating table from the president seems to be genuinely off-kilter.
Whipsawed by public pressure from the far-right House Freedom Caucus and from former president Donald Trump, McCarthy has at one moment praised the “honesty” and “professionalism” of White House negotiators and the next moment attacked the other side as “socialist.” He gives daily (sometimes hourly) updates packed with fake statistics, nonsense anecdotes and malapropisms. His negotiators have walked out of talks only to resume them hours later. This week, at a meeting of the House Republican Conference during the height of negotiations, he decided it was the right moment to auction off a stick of his used lip balm as a fundraiser for House Republicans’ political campaigns. (Rep. Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene won the bidding at $100,000.)
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The speaker’s erraticism has an obvious origin. As usual, he isn’t leading. He’s being buffeted by crosscurrents. If he bends too much in talks, he’ll lose his GOP hardliners and could therefore lose his job. If he pleases the hardliners, he keeps his job but throws the country and perhaps the world into economic calamity. His job security or the world economy? McCarthy just can’t decide.
The hardliners’ nihilism — their willingness to collapse the economy if Biden won’t meet their full list of demands — gives McCarthy leverage (to a point). In foreign affairs, Richard Nixon pioneered the “madman theory”: If you could make your foes think you were crazy and reckless enough to launch a nuclear attack, they would back down. House Republicans are doing much the same with a debt default.
Several say they don’t believe the threat of a default is real or as imminent as the Biden administration says it is. Some sound as though they are expecting a default and hoping that voters will blame the president for the resulting economic collapse. “I think my conservative colleagues … don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Semafor. McCarthy at times seems resigned to disaster, saying “don’t blame me,” and “don’t blame us Republicans,” and “it is not my fault.”
Biden, perhaps spooked by the madmen across the table, offered to freeze next year’s spending at current levels, which would save $1 trillion over 10 years. That was enough to make liberals howl that he had given away the store.
But McCarthy’s problem is he’s dealing with actual madmen in the House Freedom Caucus. McCarthy, during his 15-round bid for the speakership, conceded to these far-right hooligans the ability to toss him out of the job — “vacate the chair” — at will. Now, the rumbles have started. After contours of a deal began to emerge Thursday, 35 members of the caucus wrote to McCarthy denouncing as “outrageous” and “preposterous” the reported details — and insisting McCarthy make new demands, including immigration restrictions.
Letter to the Editor: We need longer-term discipline on the debt ceiling
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), one of the signers, gave a passionate nearly 30-minute floor speech Thursday afternoon accusing McCarthy’s negotiators of “taking the first exit ramp off to cut a deal.” Added Roy: “What are Republicans doing? Running away!”
“Let me be very clear,” he said. “From the first day I sat with the president, there’s two criterias I told him,” McCarthy said, raising two fingers. “We’re not going to raise taxes because we bring in more money than we ever have. And we’re not going to pass a clean debt ceiling. And we’ve got to spend less than we spent this year.”
Let me be very clear, Mr. Speaker. Those are three, er, “criterias.”
This might be the most worrying aspect of the default standoff: The full faith and credit of the United States hangs in the balance, and the man sitting across the negotiating table from the president seems to be genuinely off-kilter.
Whipsawed by public pressure from the far-right House Freedom Caucus and from former president Donald Trump, McCarthy has at one moment praised the “honesty” and “professionalism” of White House negotiators and the next moment attacked the other side as “socialist.” He gives daily (sometimes hourly) updates packed with fake statistics, nonsense anecdotes and malapropisms. His negotiators have walked out of talks only to resume them hours later. This week, at a meeting of the House Republican Conference during the height of negotiations, he decided it was the right moment to auction off a stick of his used lip balm as a fundraiser for House Republicans’ political campaigns. (Rep. Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene won the bidding at $100,000.)
ADVERTISING
The speaker’s erraticism has an obvious origin. As usual, he isn’t leading. He’s being buffeted by crosscurrents. If he bends too much in talks, he’ll lose his GOP hardliners and could therefore lose his job. If he pleases the hardliners, he keeps his job but throws the country and perhaps the world into economic calamity. His job security or the world economy? McCarthy just can’t decide.
The hardliners’ nihilism — their willingness to collapse the economy if Biden won’t meet their full list of demands — gives McCarthy leverage (to a point). In foreign affairs, Richard Nixon pioneered the “madman theory”: If you could make your foes think you were crazy and reckless enough to launch a nuclear attack, they would back down. House Republicans are doing much the same with a debt default.
Several say they don’t believe the threat of a default is real or as imminent as the Biden administration says it is. Some sound as though they are expecting a default and hoping that voters will blame the president for the resulting economic collapse. “I think my conservative colleagues … don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Semafor. McCarthy at times seems resigned to disaster, saying “don’t blame me,” and “don’t blame us Republicans,” and “it is not my fault.”
Biden, perhaps spooked by the madmen across the table, offered to freeze next year’s spending at current levels, which would save $1 trillion over 10 years. That was enough to make liberals howl that he had given away the store.
But McCarthy’s problem is he’s dealing with actual madmen in the House Freedom Caucus. McCarthy, during his 15-round bid for the speakership, conceded to these far-right hooligans the ability to toss him out of the job — “vacate the chair” — at will. Now, the rumbles have started. After contours of a deal began to emerge Thursday, 35 members of the caucus wrote to McCarthy denouncing as “outrageous” and “preposterous” the reported details — and insisting McCarthy make new demands, including immigration restrictions.
Letter to the Editor: We need longer-term discipline on the debt ceiling
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), one of the signers, gave a passionate nearly 30-minute floor speech Thursday afternoon accusing McCarthy’s negotiators of “taking the first exit ramp off to cut a deal.” Added Roy: “What are Republicans doing? Running away!”
