The poor being held hostage in the debt ceiling standoff
The moment negotiations over the debt ceiling with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy started, it was obvious President Biden would have to give in to Republican demands for some spending cuts.
The question now is how big they'll be and how long they'll last.
Here's what must not happen: Our country's least advantaged citizens should not be forced to pay the largest price to prevent an economic catastrophe. Making the poor poorer should never happen; it certainly shouldn't happen on a Democratic president's watch.
That issue is at the heart of this needless and destructive battle. House Republicans decided to hold the economy hostage to slash assistance for low-income Americans while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy.
That's a factual statement, not a partisan complaint.
McCarthy (R-Calif.) is not only refusing to put any of the Trumpera tax cuts for the best-off and corporations on the table; he also wants to make them permanent, adding $3.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade. So much for “deficit reduction” as the central purpose of this exercise.
Meanwhile, the GOP's desire to concentrate cuts on what is blandly called “domestic discretionary spending” would force the heaviest reductions on programs that help the least welloff, such as Head Start and assistance for food, child care and housing. Republicans mercifully say they want to protect veterans' programs, but that only forces deeper reductions elsewhere.
A revealing example: The House appropriations bill for agriculture released last week guts the 2021 pandemic-era increase to benefits for fruits and vegetables under the Women, Infants and Children program, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported affect “nearly 1.5 million pregnant, postpartum, or breastfeeding participants and roughly 3.5 million children aged 1 through 4.”
Then there is the GOP's insistence on “work requirements” for recipients of various government assistance programs. These would not help anyone get jobs but would tie up working people eligible for assistance in bureaucratic red tape.
“Despite rhetoric rooted in racist stereotypes, most people who can work do work,” said CBPP President Sharon Parrott. People turn to core government programs, she told me, “because their jobs don't pay enough to make ends meet or they are out of work, often temporarily.”
Parrott's view is shared well beyond the Democratic Party's progressive wing. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) flatly declared last week that “work requirements are a nonstarter.”
This speaks to the difficulty of building majorities in the House and Senate for any accord McCarthy and Biden might reach. Because his party's right wing will oppose anything short of its maximum demands, McCarthy cannot deliver a majority for a deal without large numbers of Democratic votes. They will be hard to get for a proposal remotely as draconian as his ultras want, one reason progressives are pushing Biden to bypass the debt ceiling by invoking the 14th Amendment's requirement that the government honor its obligations.
“Kevin McCarthy does not know how many votes he has,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Politico, speaking not just as a leading progressive but also a shrewd vote counter. “He can't even go to the White House and say, if you give me this, I will have X votes.”
McCarthy also has to wonder if coming to terms with
Biden would prompt a challenge to his leadership from hard-liners. He no doubt hoped that Friday's brief Republican walkout from the talks would persuade his right flank that he's taking a hard line.
Democrats once hoped that enough Republicans who represent districts the president carried in 2020 would be amenable to a clean debt ceiling increase. But these vulnerable members of the GOP had close ties to McCarthy and an aversion to handing Democrats a victory. So to get McCarthy into the room with Biden, they went along with some harsh cuts in the speaker's bill even while saying they opposed them - clearly hoping that Democratic negotiators would save them from themselves.
Biden's lieutenants and his allies in Congress insist that they are not repeating the errors of President Barack Obama's debt ceiling strategy in 2011. They say they have already pushed Republicans back from some of their more extreme demands, forced them to make public the sweep of the cuts they originally sought, and are trying to avoid binding future Congresses to budget decisions won through extortion. And they expect to save Biden's signature programs on clean energy and student debt.
But this sorry episode, made possible by an irrational debt ceiling law that ought to have been repealed long ago, should never have happened. The fact that Americans with the lowest incomes are political pawns in this exercise is a moral stain on our country.