Seth Abramson is a bit of everything from professor of communication arts and sciences to criminal defense attorney to author to political analyst/writer, and his views are usually spot on.  His newsletter this morning hit the nail on the head regarding the Republican Party, debt ceiling, and the GOP intent to destroy not only the president, but the presidency and with it, the democratic foundation of the nation.  Take a look … see what you think …

A Five-Paragraph Explanation of the Debt Crisis

While the consequences of America going into default on its financial obligations are impossible to overstate, the story about how and why we got to where we are is in fact a fairly simple one.

By Seth Abramson

27 May 2023

Congressional spending in Washington over the last few decades has consistently been excessive, with most of the problem relating to overspending on the Pentagon, unnecessary pork sought by politicians of both major political parties in the United States, various forms of corporate welfare, and reckless tax cuts for the wealthy. The GOP has been particularly irresponsible in its spending under Republican presidents, presuming—rightly—that it can simply wait for a Democratic president to enter the White House to demand austerity and falsely accuse Democrats (who are certainly not blameless in the problem of overspending) of being the sole cause of profligacy in DC. One thing that’s remained constant in all this is that Republicans have no concern about raising the nation’s debt ceiling when a Republican president is in office. Their supposedly principled views on this matter manifest only when the man or woman they would be sticking it to by putting up a fight over the debt ceiling is a Democrat.

Several years ago, a new phenomenon intruded on the predictable, almost-clockwork-like parade of events, accusations, and recriminations described above. And that was this: the Republican Party ceased to be a credible negotiating party in Washington for the simple reason that it decided to conclude its ever-tenuous interest in governance. It realized, in short, that since most of its base had no love for the federal government anyway—in part because GOP leaders had methodically lied to it about how much of the average Republican’s life depends on federal spending—it could simply make its political platform the end of responsible federal governance. Thus, when Republicans were in control of the Congress with a Democratic president, unprecedented holds on judicial nominations issued, including one that literally stripped Barack Obama of his constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice; executive-branch positions requiring Congressional confirmation, even many that related to national security and international diplomacy, remained unfilled when the GOP ran Congress and it was a Democratic president getting denied the power to govern responsibly; and even the viability of democracy—including formerly uncontroversial concepts like absentee voting and early voting—was soon called into question by a political party no longer operating like a political party at all, replacing its policy platform with an implied promise to toss sand in the gears of American government at every turn. The GOP became, in short, a cult dedicated to pampering the Big Feelings of its base, which were monstrously (and often also incoherently and/or paradoxically) anti-government.

Then the pandemic came, and hundreds of thousands of innocents died needlessly for the simple reason that America’s president at the time happened to be the leader of the Republican Party and a chief advocate for venal and petty obstructionism of the normal functions of government (also, he himself had grown up in a cult in which bad news is ignored). The recklessness, negligence, and in a few cases the criminality of Donald Trump and his administration in the first year of the pandemic deepened the cost of the pandemic in America—ensuring we would be hit harder by COVID-19 than any other nation—and also extended its duration, forcing already high federal spending to increase even more dramatically than it would have otherwise in the midst of a national emergency. Whereas before the coronavirus arrived, spending in Washington as a percentage of GDP had remained below the heights of World War II, once the pandemic began under Trump the nation fully entered a debt crisis. And yet the Republican Party continued to ignore the problem because (per its credo) it could not be said to properly exist until a Democrat was back in the White House. Once Joe Biden was elected and Trump’s violent coup—aided in various ways many Republican politicians in Washington and the fifty states—was put down, Republicans set about trying to keep President Biden from getting America out of the hole Trump had put it in by demanding austerity at exactly the mid-pandemic moment that they knew it was unwise and would cause further harm to the country.

Fortunately, President Biden was able to pass much of his post-pandemic agenda—which, while expensive, helped the United States climb out of the pandemic and bring unemployment to its lowest level since 1969. Indeed, the American economy is now so hot that the Fed has had to work overtime to slow it down. Fears of a recession linger. It is at this sensitive time in the history of the United States, with a war in Europe and civil upheavals caused by an unprecedentedly far-right SCOTUS and a post-pandemic economy teetering on the brink of calamity that the Republican Party has decided to press a gun to the heads of all Americans on the comparatively minor issue of the debt ceiling, which, we must recall, is not a concern for the GOP (nor is federal spending generally) when one of their number is in the Oval Office. Indeed, the Republicans would soon make clear that they weren’t actually interested in fiscal responsibility by passing a debt-ceiling hike that was tied to a condition any American would’ve known in advance was going to be unacceptable to any person of common sense: specifically, the GOP now demanded that, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling in the way it did without question or tumult under Donald Trump, the entirety of Joe Biden’s domestic policy agenda (which in totality made him one of the most successful—if, inexplicably, not popular—first-term presidents in U.S. history) would have to be nixed completely.

It was not a serious proposal, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was meant as propaganda for the Republican base to spread on social media, which they now have en masse. The propaganda follows these misleading, even gaslighting talking points: (1) Republicans passed a debt-ceiling hike already (technically true, but it was devised in such a way that no politician of the party opposite could possibly have voted for it or received it as being in good faith); (2) Democrats have since “refused to negotiate” (wildly untrue, as despite knowing that he doesn’t have a good-faith negotiating partner Biden and the Democrats have made shockingly robust and persistent attempts to hammer out a deal with the men and women who admit—yes, some say so publicly—that they have taken the nation “hostage”); and (3) Democrats are responsible for the present debt crisis because the party passed the most recent spending bill in Washington before Republicans could take over (while it’s true Democrats passed a budget in December 2022 because they were obligated to do so, and while it’s true that that budget reflects the priorities of the leader of the Democratic Party as he continues to try to save America from four years of stunning mismanagement under Trump, it is yet again wildly untrue that the 2022 spending bill necessitated the current crisis, which the Republicans chose to fabricate after ignoring out-of-control spending for four years under Trump). Nevertheless, the Republicans are betting that enough independents will blame Biden for the collapse of the American economy that the GOP carefully engineered that it will help Trump get back into power in 2024—presumably so that he can do even more damage to American democracy, our economy, the ability of our government to function consistent with the U.S. Constitution, and our preparedness for dealing with myriad near-term domestic and international crises.

This is the current Default Crisis in a nutshell, and this is why I say that the present course of action elected by the Republicans is part and parcel of the insurrection it has sought to wage inside America for years. Some parts of that insurrection were of course criminal—like January 6—while others aren’t criminal but unconstitutional. Still others are neither criminal nor unconstitutional but indisputably un-American. The Republican Party would be happy to see the American government shut down—even collapse—because that is the end both its paramilitary and political fringe have now been working toward for years. One hopes that the Biden administration will see before it is too late that not only does it not have a good-faith negotiating partner (in fact, Kevin McCarthy isn’t even in control of his own party, its insurrectionist faction is) but is trying to extend his hand to people who want American democracy to expire.