Republicans' Debt Ceiling Brinkmanship Is Self-Incriminating
The federal government is about to breach its legal borrowing limit. Republicans in Congress acknowledge that this would be catastrophic: It would crash the economy and force a default from which the United States would never fully recover. Congress could avert this crisis by raising the debt ceiling, but Republicans refuse to do so. They’re pledging to vote in lockstep against the debt ceiling increase, and they’re claiming that this behavior on their part—in effect, voting to sabotage the government and the economy—doesn’t matter, because they don’t have enough votes to win.
It’s an odd message. In a normal democracy, each party tells voters that if it’s elected, good things will happen, and bad things will be prevented. Republicans are saying the opposite: that America will be spared a terrible fate because the other party controls Congress. The Republican message is that the country will survive because Republicans don’t hold power.
Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, agrees that a debt ceiling breach is unthinkable. “America must never default. The debt ceiling will need to be raised,” he affirmed last week at a press conference. “Don’t play Russian roulette with our economy,” McConnell told Democrats. “Step up and raise the debt ceiling.” Yet he vowed that his party would do the opposite. “We will not provide Republican votes for raising the debt limit,” he declared on Monday. John Thune, the GOP’s second-ranking senator, pledged that not a “single Republican” would vote to raise the limit.
At the same time, Senate Republicans promised that nothing bad would happen, because Democrats would save the day. “The debt ceiling will be raised, as it always should be, but it will be raised by the Democrats,” said McConnell. In a CNN interview, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey delivered the same message. “There is no calamity that’s going to happen,” Toomey assured viewers, because “after Republicans vote no,” Democrats would “pass the debt ceiling all by themselves.”
Republicans think that by voting against the debt ceiling hike, they’re showing that Democrats are responsible for the debt. But they’re really demonstrating that the security of the United States depends on Democratic control of Congress. In press briefings, Republican leaders in the House and Senate have argued that the country is safe because, in the words of Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, Democrats “can keep the government operating, not default on the debt, and do it without a single Republican vote.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-debt-ceiling-brinkmanship-is-self-incriminating/ar-AAP12oG
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