Hey, Democrats, stop acting like children.
To Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and fellow moderates: Stop stalling. West Virginians and Arizonans, like the vast majority of Americans, want paid family and medical leave, easier access to preschool, cheaper community colleges, and breaks on their health insurance and taxes. You can’t stomach $3.5 trillion? Then how about $2 trillion? Put up a number. The longer you play hard-to-get on President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, the more likely you are to produce nothing for your constituents.
To both sides in this internecine squabble: Failure isn’t an option. If you come up empty on both of these packages, you will kill the rest of the Biden agenda, mortally wound the Biden presidency, and facilitate a Republican takeover of the House and the Senate — handing power to a faction that is creeping toward authoritarianism.
In failure, Democrats, you will be enabling those who are now sabotaging the Biden presidency. Republican leaders have been undermining vaccination efforts, thereby sabotaging the country’s emergence from the pandemic. Party officials have been holding phony “audits” to discredit election results, thereby sabotaging democracy. Now Senate Republicans are blocking a debt-ceiling increase, thereby sabotaging the markets and the economy.
It’s getting difficult to avoid the cynical conclusion that they are sabotaging America in hopes of tagging Biden and the Democrats with the misery that results.
At a Capitol news conference Wednesday afternoon, Republicans actually celebrated the possibility of defaulting on the full faith and credit of the United States government. “#DemsInDisarray” said the display on stage. No. 4 on the poster’s list: “Potential Debt Default.” (No. 5 celebrated Democrats’ self-induced trouble: “Infrastructure Vote Delayed.”) In between claims that Democrats are “socialists" operating like Communist China’s police state, they leaned into default brinkmanship.
“One failure after another,” exulted Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). “They currently are scrambling to try to figure out how are they going to lift the debt ceiling.”
Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the Republican whip, celebrated that Democrats are “going after their own members right now,” and falsely said Democrats needed to raise the debt limit “to accommodate all that new spending.”
In fact, the debt ceiling must be raised to pay the interest on debts already incurred, 97 percent of which were accrued before Biden’s presidency. Republicans agreed to run up $8 trillion in debt under President Donald Trump and are now refusing to pay the bill.
They won’t lift the debt ceiling, they won’t negotiate, and they’re using a filibuster to block Democrats from doing it themselves. Instead, they’re trying to force Democrats to go through a weeks-long, seven-step process to raise the ceiling (a House resolution, followed by a Senate Budget Committee markup, a discharge action to get it to the Senate floor if Republicans object, a marathon amendment session called a “vote-a-rama,” another bill passed by the House, another “vote-a-rama,” and then a third trip to the House if any amendments are adopted).
At Wednesday’s GOP event, I asked Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) if Republicans would be willing to negotiate with Democrats over the debt ceiling, as in the past.
Sure, he replied, “if the Democrats would take this $5 trillion bill off the table, and they work with me on a plan to slow the rate of growth of the entitlement programs.”
So he’ll negotiate over the debt limit if Democrats first abandon both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better agenda, and agree to cuts in Social Security and Medicare? That’s not negotiating; that’s hostage taking.
Democrats, your political opponents are not operating on the level. They’re taking the United States to (and possibly over) the edge of default, even though that would likely cause a market crash, recession and massive job losses. They are so determined to sabotage Democrats that they are willing to sabotage America.
Keep that in mind, Democrats, and stop these childish threats to bring down one bill or the other if you don’t get precisely your way. Otherwise you’re abandoning your own Democratic priorities — and your own democratic priorities.
“We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works — and can deliver for the people,” Biden said in his address to Congress in April. Stop the stalling and the squabbling, Democrats. The stakes are too high.
