The New Face of the GOP

UPDATE: Tuesday's news was of a revival of a bipartisan Senate plan to address longterm deficit and debt as a way to enact the grand deal President Obama called for while also raising the debt ceiling.  This story summarizes, with links. Notably this proposal sets targets but doesn't specify all the cuts, just the categories. Procedurally this might work as a budget resolution in the Senate attached to a previous House bill, which would then go back to the House, all theoretically in time to prevent default.  But though the adults are in the Senate, the House has to go along, and no signs Tuesday that would happen.  Meanwhile the fail-safe McConnell-Reid plan is being refined, though again House support is lacking.  But the most interesting statement of the day came from former President Bill Clinton, who said that as President he would have no hesitation in invoking the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent default and continue paying the bills, because Congress had already voted on the spending and there's nothing in the Constitution about them getting to vote on it twice.  Was this Bill sounding off, or was it with the knowledge and approval of the White House?


Here's your ultimate budget-cutter, cutting down the country, killing it dead.  Nothing less.  That's the new face of the GOP.

There were two trains running in Washington on Monday.  The establishment train involved secret meetings between the President and the House GOPer leaders (Banal and Cant) at the White House, while the House prepared to pass an outrageously suicidal set of conditions attached to a debt ceiling bill that will never pass the Senate and which President Obama promised to veto if it did--that is, the usual partisan face-saving, campaign issue-stoking symbolism.  Meanwhile the Reid-McConnell plan, onerous as it is but at least it raises the debt ceiling with barely acceptable attachments, continues to work its way to what the establishment--and Wall Street--expects will be ultimate passage, in time to avert Armageddon.

But the second train was the Tea Party GOPers suicide express, running on the renewable fuel of denial.  While even past Republican administration figures and elder statemen, along with all major figures in finance and economics continued to warn of apocalyptic consequences of default--one predicting an economy worse than the Great Depression--these TP denialists weren't listening.  The most chilling observation I heard Monday was by a reporter for the Hill newspaper who said that TP intransigence was actually growing, as their institutional support like the Club for Growth pushed back aggressively, insisting that default was the right thing to do, regardless of the consequences.

At least some of their votes will be required in the House.  One of the unnerving elements of this situation is that there's not much press on vote counts.  It suggests nobody has any idea of who will vote for what.

A political analysis explaining this intransigence (that these House members come from safe GOPer districts, and their worry is the primary, which is where the TP is strongest) fails to recognize that if they blow up the economy, no GOPer district will be safe.

This is the very definition of a precipice moment.  Everything is normal as alternatives are debated, but one wrong move and it's off the cliff, and guess what?  No turning back.  We've been in similar places before--I've got my deja vu from just before the bombing began the Iraq war, or just before the tax cut for the wealthy was passed (a temporary tax cut was the excuse, but it was as clear then as it is today that GOPers would characterize ending the temporary cut as a tax hike.)  But this is even worse.  It's much farther down, and the fall will be fast.  We will all be affected.  Suffering will be widespread.

The TPers denial is as complete on this issue as it is on the Climate Crisis.  Facts are not facts unless they come from their true believers.  All experts are suspect except their experts.  Everybody else is lying for political gain, only they are pure and doing God's work.  Meanwhile, the country bakes in their denial, and even a Greater Depression won't make the Climate Crisis go away.  It will just make it so much harder to deal with.

It is a small, power-mad, fanatical and profoundly ignorant group, intent on acting contrary to the wishes of a clear majority of Americans, as well as the interests of all Americans, of America itself.  No terrorist organization could possibly cause as much damage.  This is the defining moment.  And the longer there is uncertainty about whether they are going to be stopped, the more dangerous and unpredictable every day is, in the two weeks left before the United States goes broke because of them.