I’ve been reading some breathless reporting about how President Biden’s successful negotiation with Kevin McCarthy averted an economic catastrophe.
I think that Biden did a masterful job that accomplished a lot, but I don’t think that the default-catastrophe was ever in the cards.
What Biden achieved through the deal he negotiated, if I understand correctly (and a major contributor to my understanding of this has been Lawrence O’Donnell), included two important goals:
1) He got the debt-limit extortion-weapon taken off the table for the rest of this term in his Presidency. The Republicans will not be in a position to pull this stunt again in the spring of 2024.
2) He got a budget deal — which required agreement with the Republicans because they control the House, and which needed to be reached one way or another to keep the government operating into the next fiscal year — now, guaranteeing that there will not be a government shut-down next fall.
The Republicans DO have the ability to shutdown the government, as we’ve seen a couple of times over the past few decades. But I do not believe there was ever a danger that, had McCarthy refused to make a deal acceptable to Biden, they ever were in a position to drive the United States into default.
(And while government shutdowns are a bad thing, they are not the catastrophe that a default would be.)
What I am betting — when I say that there was never a danger that there would have been that “catastrophe” this deal is said to have averted -- is that Biden had in his pocket a back-up plan to take some sort of unilateral action to pay America’s bills.
I’m betting that Biden and his team always had a Plan B: “If McCarthy actually acts as the servant of the crazies, we’ll at least meet the urgent requirement to defend the ‘full faith and credit of the United States.’”
I have no idea if Plan B involved the 14th Amendment, or the $1 trillion platinum coin, or one of the other clever means that clever people have proposed during this crisis. (I wonder if we will ever know what their fallback was.)
But I expect it would have worked well enough. (I don’t see the Republicans successfully challenging any such solution, asserting their right to blow the nation’s head off. I don’t see the Supremes choosing to back the hostage-takers.)
Biden achieved more than that by reaching this deal, and he deserves all the praise he’s received.
His way of being President, in the face of this unprecedentedly destructive and ugly Republican Party, is not the way I’d deal with them. I’d be exposing and denouncing them. Hitting them over the head with the truth.
But there’s more than one way to defeat an opponent such as Biden faces. Just as there is a place for the way of the prophet and for the way of the priest.
Biden is the master of the way of the priest: While he hasn’t done much to help the nation see how dark is the truth about today’s Republicans, he is positioning himself masterfully to keep the power of the Presidency out of their hands in 2024.
He is the candidate of normal, and he’ll be running again against Donald Trump, the candidate of chaos. The majority of Americans will choose normal.
He is the candidate of bipartisanship — he even praised McCarthy in his nationwide speech last night — and he’s getting good things done in “bi-partisan” ways beyond people thought possible. The majority of Americans will choose a President that’s getting the government to work on their behalf.
His way of fighting the Republicans seems to be heading for another — likely even bigger — victory over Trump and the Trump Party in 2024.
And history will judge him a hero for that.