After the most recent economic data showed robust job growth in the United States, President Joe Biden identified the most serious threat to the national economy.
The “biggest threat to our recovery,” the Democrat said a few weeks ago, is “the Republicans in the United States Congress” as they use the debt ceiling to threaten Americans with possible default.
We were reminded again yesterday that Biden had a point. The Associated Press reported:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Tuesday he’s increasingly concerned about President Joe Biden’s unwillingness to negotiate on lifting the nation’s borrowing authority, saying in a letter to the president that the White House position could “hold dire ramifications for the entire nation.”
“With each passing day, I am incredibly concerned that you are putting an already fragile economy in jeopardy by insisting upon your extreme position of refusing to negotiate any meaningful changes to out-of-control government spending alongside an increase of the debt limit,” McCarthy wrote in a letter to the White House.
It’s an open question as to whether the House speaker fully appreciates just how painfully ridiculous his letter was. McCarthy and his party are putting the economy in jeopardy, so he accused the president of putting the economy in jeopardy. McCarthy and his party are taking an extreme position by launching a hostage crisis, so he accused Biden of taking an extreme position.
The White House’s position has long been straightforward: There can be no negotiations with those who threaten to hurt Americans on purpose, but if Republicans want to have budget talks, Biden remains entirely open to reviewing the GOP’s ideas.
In contrast, there’s McCarthy’s position: If Biden doesn’t negotiate with those threatening Americans with deliberate harm, he’s being “extreme.” What’s more, to hear the GOP leader tell it, Republicans either can’t or won’t come up with a plan of their own, but the president should negotiate with the party anyway — by telling the speaker what kind of ransom Biden is willing to pay in order to prevent Republicans from imposing a catastrophe.
On the surface, there’s a rather obvious problem with all of this: McCarthy’s position is pitiful, and he’s approaching the issue in a fundamentally unserious way. But just below the surface, there’s an even more serious problem that the public needs to understand: In the coming months, if the House speaker and his party follow through with their threats to hurt us, the effects of a default would be absolutely devastating.
This was scary in 2011, during the GOP’s first debt ceiling crisis, but at the time, Republican leaders at least had some sense of what they were doing, and they gained leverage by passing an actual budget plan they could use during talks. Twelve years later, McCarthy’s plan is effectively to play with matches, even if it’s American families who get burned.
For what it’s worth — and it’s really not worth much — the California Republican’s letter to Biden yesterday included some vague references to spending priorities, which was a step toward specificity that McCarthy has generally avoided, but as a Talking Points Memo report added, “It is apparently also Biden’s responsibility to translate what’s essentially a handful of messaging bullet points into fleshed-out policies.”
Biden responded to the House speaker late yesterday, again explaining the basics. The president also reminded McCarthy Republicans raised the debt ceiling several times during the Trump era, and there’s nothing stopping them from being similarly responsible this year.
“This has been done by previous Congresses with no conditions attached and this Congress should act quickly to do so now,” Biden explained, reminding the GOP leader of a basic detail Republicans prefer to ignore.
