The debt ceiling fight was never about debt. It was about Republican power
The debt ceiling drama seems to be nearing its end, as the US House of Representatives passed legislation that would lift the debt ceiling in accordance with a deal reached last weekend between Joe Biden, the president, and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the House. The Republicans have been fighting to force cuts in spending and/or eligibility for food stamps (Snap), Medicaid, childcare and pre-schools, education and grants for higher education.
By linking these and other provisions to the lifting of the debt ceiling, the Republicans tried to use the threat of default on the public debt to force Democrats to accept them. The legislation, which now goes to the Senate where it is expected to pass, did not satisfy most of their desires.
The worst abuse that Republicans managed to include will be suffered by the hundreds of thousands of poor people who will likely lose access to food assistance under the Snap program. Many are in poor health and will not be able to complete the work requirements that Republicans have insisted on imposing for people of age 50-54; others will lose benefits due to additional red tape.
There was also damage done by the fictitious narrative that Republicans were able to successfully promote about the “ticking time bomb” of the public debt. There is no bomb and if there were, it would not be ticking.
The relevant measure of our debt burden is how much we pay annually in net interest on the debt, as a share of our national income (or roughly,
GDP). That number was 1.9% for 2022. That is not big, by any comparison. We averaged about 3% in the 1990s, while experiencing America’s then longestrunning economic expansion.
The constant repetition of the “threat” posed by our national debt was a big win for Republicans, who are always looking to cut spending on social needs and safety nets; and more strategically important, to cut spending that could aid recovery from an economic downturn when Democrats are in power.
In the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009), Republicans fought against measures to stimulate an economic recovery, which were already too small as proposed by Democrats. By October 2010, unemployment was still at 9.4%. In the election a month later, Republicans gained 63 seats to take the House and six Senate seats.
The debt ceiling was used to threaten the Biden administration with a default on the public debt if they did not agree to Republican demands, mostly for spending cuts. The ceiling itself doesn’t affect new spending; it’s just holding up a chunk of the spending that our government is already obligated by law to carry out. In a democracy, this type of extortion should not be permitted.
But Republican power isn’t based on democracy; on the contrary, it’s become highly dependent on institutions and practices that most people, including experts, would consider undemocratic or anti-democratic.
Republicans benefit enormously from the fact that 80% of senators are elected by about 50% of voters. And if that’s not slanted enough, there is the filibuster, which effectively requires a 60-vote majority to win almost any pro-democracy reforms. This includes changes that are needed even for the Senate as presently constituted: eg representation for Washington DC, which has more population than a couple of states. We are the only democracy in the world where people who live in our national capital city don’t have full voting rights.
Then there is voter suppression and gerrymandering, for both state and federal elections. These two methods of influencing election outcomes have gone hand-in-hand. Of course swing states are prime targets: recall that Republican presidents who ruled for 12 of the past 22 years came to power while losing the popular vote.
When Republicans win, they then use their power to stack the cards further in their favor. This includes packing the judiciary, where Republican judges advance their agenda.
Their decades-long struggle to control the judiciary reached its pinnacle with a 6-3 majority of the US supreme court, with five justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.
The current Republican majority now “substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law”, the dissenting justices wrote when that majority revoked the right to abortion last year.
Dozens of senators have described the supreme court as “captured” by “dark money” from Republican donors, including “rightwing billionaires”, and it is currently facing lost credibility as well as accusations of corruption.
If the Republicans had gotten all that they had included in their legislation to lift the debt limit, it would have reduced the public debt by less than one half of 1% next year.
This makes it even clearer that the debt ceiling fight was never really about debt reduction. It’s part of a vicious cycle in which political power is abused in order to consolidate a system that is increasingly undemocratic; and then further abused. The debt ceiling is just one part of that cycle, and should not have been negotiated; it needs to be abolished.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC and the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy
an odd corner of American celebrity morphs into a recounting of abuse within the family, to abuse propagated and protected by IBLP, and to the inroads fundamentalist, authoritarianleaning Christianity has made in US schools, government and civic life. (The series arrives a month before the first anniversary of the reversal of Roe v Wade, long the goal for the religious right.)
Shiny Happy People is only nominally about the Duggars and their weird, distinctly American celebrity. “We wanted to use the Duggars as a societal touchpoint and not focus solely on them, because they were the gateway in terms of knowing who they were for the average American to bring us into something that’s unknown,” said the series co-director Julia Willoughby Nason (LulaRich, Fyre Fraud). Though the Institute in Basic Life Principles may be unknown to many, it’s not irrelevant. The extreme teachings of Bill Gothard dovetailed with the Christian homeschooling movement in the US, and the politically active religious right in the US. “I think more and more [fundamentalist Christianity] is becoming more mainstream, especially since
Trump got elected – there’s this huge underbelly and infrastructure in American culture of authoritarianism,” said Nason.
The series features interviews with several ex-IBLP members who contextualize, often in painful, haunting detail, the teachings polished up by the Duggars’ reality TV series. The parentification of children – pre-teen and teenage siblings taking full-time care of a baby – was whitewashed as “the buddy system”. The immense amount of labor required to keep the household running, all assumed by the girls in the family, was treated as a curious oddity. “Wisdom booklets” from Gothard’s homeschooling program, which instructed children on sinful temptation – the series quotes one which asks children to identify the “eye traps” in different female outfits – are passed off as equivalent education. Cheeky interest in the family’s courtship rituals – entirely chaperoned dates, no kissing until marriage, presentation of a “wedding night” instructional CD the day before the ceremony – put a playful spin on the subjugation of women. According to Gothard’s “umbrella of authority”, women’s faithfulness to God depended on complete submission and subservience to first their fathers, then their husbands; a wedding was not so much a celebration of love as a transfer of power.
More chilling are revelations of abuse endemic to IBLP. Gothard, like some other fundamentalist Christians, used biblical passages to justify punishment by the “rod” to “break a child’s will”. IBLP advocated the “blanket training” of Baptist ministers Michael and Debi Pearl, in which an infant or toddler is placed on a blanket with toys within reach; parents are instructed to hit the child repeatedly when they reach for one. On-screen, the Duggar children were mild-mannered and deferential. Other than Michelle’s cheery mentions of “blanket time”, there’s no indication of the off-screen methods used to achieve it.
According to former friends of the Duggars, Jim Bob and Michelle were well aware of Josh’s molestation of his sisters before the show aired, just as many IBLP higher-ups were aware of Gothard’s harassment of young women, violations repeatedly swept under the rug and pinned on victims. When the emphasis is always on the perils of temptation, up to disallowing men from changing the diapers of female infants lest they familiarize with female anatomy, the blame never falls on the perpetrator. As Heather Heath, an exIBLP member, puts it in the series, “you can’t exist without being accused of tempting a man to attack you”. Jill Duggar Dillard, the only Duggar offspring to participate in the series, recalls with regret the family’s efforts to use her to restore their reputation in the wake of Josh’s crimes: “You just feel like the burden and the weight falls on you to, like, help, because you’re the only one who can.”
“The Duggar family is not a bizarre fascination. It is a horrifying glimpse of a story that was told over and over and over again in so many different families,” says Josh Pease, a pastor and journalist, in the series. As the series argues in later episodes, that story of harmonious obedience flowed through the Duggars, to IBLP, through other fundamentalist ministries and into mainstream American institutions via the “Joshua Generation”, a decadeslong project to place fundamentalist, evangelical Christians in positions of power, up to and including the US Senate and supreme court.
The series takes on a dense knot of politics and power, ultimately composed of many people in different relations to the ideology that shaped them, one whose popular understanding was shaped by a reality show. Shiny Happy People attempts to “[flip] the script on the audience a little bit, asking, what are we complicit in? What are we passively consuming without looking deeper into what actually is going on?” said Crist. (Representatives for TLC declined to participate in the series.)
The final episode focuses on a new generation of Christian influencers, some of whom, like 19 Kids and Counting, burnish the reputation of fundamentalism. And some who have “deconstructed” the ideology of their youth, extending far beyond the personal journeys of the Duggar offspring.
“There’s a large community online, as you see in the show, who are standing up and saying, ‘Hey, we were brought up this way, and this was really abusive and not OK,’” said Crist. “But there’s always going to be the opposition to that, and that’s the scary part that I hope our show shines a light on – that fundamentalism in America, whether it exists in social media, whether we’re talking about IBLP [or] any subgroups, are very much alive and well and also in our political system.”
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets is available on Amazon Prime on 2 June