Mccarthy’s debt ceiling plan is theater unworthy of a high school
When Rep. Brian Mast, R-fla., nominated Kevin Mccarthy for House speaker on the eighth ballot in January’s 15-ballot spectacle, he spoke words meant to reassure the party’s right-wing holdouts about the California Republican.
“He’s not John Boehner,” Mast said, referring to the former Republican speaker who believed in governing. Boehner, you’ll recall, came to loathe radicals in his party’s ranks whom he referred to — when he was being polite — as “knuckleheads,” “noisemakers” and the “chaos caucus.”
Mast was accurate in seeing Mccarthy as quite different from Boehner. This should petrify his colleagues — and the rest of the country, too.
In 2011’s debt-ceiling fight, Boehner made a deal. This time, there is little reason to trust that Mccarthy, who has made himself a prisoner of his party’s right wing, can negotiate effectively or in good faith.
That 2011 deal was quite good from conservatives’ point of view in forcing spending reduction. In the long run, it was unfortunate for President Barack Obama and for economic growth.
Joe Biden was involved in the episode as Obama’s vice president and learned from the experience. He is not about to upend a growing economy with steep spending cuts. Nor does he want to glorify the absurd bill Mccarthy is trying to push through the House this week that ties a debt-ceiling increase to outlandish budget cuts that have absolutely no chance of passing the Senate.
President Biden’s position is reasonable and by no means dogmatic. Enough Republicans, he says, should join with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling for spending that has already happened. The cap, after all, was suspended three times when Donald Trump was president without much fuss or fanfare. Then, the two sides really should negotiate — about an actual budget.
The catch? Mccarthy is having trouble uniting his caucus behind any budget proposal, so the speaker has pushed aside governing in favor of theater. And the production is not even worthy of a high school gym. (I apologize to high school thespians who take their work more seriously.)
It is truly astonishing, as my Washington Post colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman wrote last week, that any Republican operating under labels such as “moderate,” “mainstream” or “problem solver” would vote for a Mccarthy proposal that hides its ferocity behind sanitized budgetary gobbledygook. Mccarthy would cut federal spending back to 2022 levels and limit its growth to 1% a year.
What this means in plain English, as The Post’s Tony Romm reported, are “massive spending cuts,” but without having to specify them. Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, helpfully translated the impact to particular programs. If Republicans exempted defense spending from their ax, as they seem inclined to do, all other programs would suffer 22% cuts, she said, which “would grow deeper and deeper with each year of their plan.”
That 22% would mean, to take just a few of her examples, 30 million fewer veteran outpatient visits; layoffs of 108,000 teachers in schools with low-income students and kids with disabilities; 200,000 fewer children in Head Start; and 180,000 children losing access to child care. And rightto-lifers take note: “1.7 million women, infants, and children would lose vital nutrition assistance through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.”
Because Republicans don’t get specific, they can deny they want to do any of these things. But that’s why Congress should just pass the debt-ceiling increase and move the debate to specific budget choices and their impact. (By the way, don’t be surprised if, by the time you read this, Mccarthy has exempted various groups from cuts, notably veterans.)
There is other bad stuff in the bill. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the proposal’s Medicaid work requirements would put more than 10 million people at risk for losing their health coverage. It would eliminate many of Biden’s clean-energy incentives. And, as my colleague Catherine Rampell pointed out, the bill would actually increase the deficit by slicing Internal Revenue Service funding, hemming in its efforts to collect from rich tax cheats.
The ideal outcome would be for Mccarthy’s bill to go down. But even if it passes, don’t look for Biden to rush to the negotiating table. Again: Mccarthy is not Boehner. “Boehner and Obama both saw an upside to a negotiation they thought could result in historic tax and entitlement reform,” Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama, said in an interview. “Of course, all of that crashed and burned.”
“Here,” Furman added, “there’s nothing good that President Biden thinks could possibly come out of this.”
The Economist magazine recently devoted its cover to the U.S. economy as “a marvel to behold.” It would be both stupid and bewildering to allow the fractious politics of an unstable House Republican caucus to tank it.