Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy picked a bad time to take an extended 18-day recess. He ceded all the ground to a President Joe Biden who has taken the momentum from totally owning the GOP in his State of the Union address. The headlines are all Biden’s, as he’s relentlessly stayed on message about the malicious designs Republicans have on Social Security and Medicare. You only need to see how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has knee-capped McCarthy to know how this is going.
The House GOP has continued to flail in the face of Biden’s onslaught. They have no plan, no budget, and no real hopes of forging agreement on a budget that won’t be laughed out of the committee room.
At this point they’re still trying to get House Republicans on the same page to show McCarthy can get 218 votes. CNN reports that he brought “leaders of the so-called ‘five families’ of the House GOP – representing the various ideological wings of the conference” together for the first time last week. Better late than never. (Also, why do Republicans want to pretend like they’re the mafia and do they not remember how that story worked out for most of the families?) To show how absolutely serious this meeting was, “McCarthy didn’t attend the session but enlisted a close confidant, Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, to lead the discussions, with top committee chairmen and other members of leadership also participating.”
The aim of this meeting was “to begin to develop a consensus about a proposal that can pass the House with GOP votes and strengthen their conference’s negotiating position.” In other words, they don’t have a plan. They are working on a plan that could maybe put them is a position to create a plan that all the Republicans can agree on. In the meantime, President Biden has given them a deadline: March 9. That’s when he’s going to release his budget. We’ve seen, however, how bad Republicans are at completing the homework Biden has assigned them.
What they got out of the meeting, House Financial Services Committee chair Patrick McHenry said, was a “healthy discussion” where everyone showed “goodwill” in trying to “to come up with an approach that unifies Republicans and enables us to unlock the rest of the legislative year.” So: nothing of substance.
While they’re having their little planning sessions, Biden is on the stump cementing his narrative. That’s helped by reality. Yes, a debt default would be catastrophic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen got some headlines with that message on Tuesday.
“In the longer term, a default would raise the cost of borrowing into perpetuity. Future investments, including public investments, would become substantially more costly,” she said in a speech to the National Association of Counties meeting in Washington this week. That has real effects for everyone, she stressed.
“Household payments on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards would rise, and American businesses would see credit markets deteriorate,” she said. “On top of that, it is unlikely that the federal government would be able to issue payments to millions of Americans, including our military families and seniors who rely on Social Security.”
“Let’s not wait until the last minute,” Yellen said. ”I believe it is a basic responsibility of our nation’s leaders to get this done.”
The Congressional Budget Office released its updated projection of the timeline for the debt ceiling on Wednesday. The limit was reached on Jan. 19, and the Treasury started taking its legal “extraordinary measures” to shift funds and obligations around to buy more time. That time will run out this summer, the CBO is projecting, between July and September.
That’s with a caveat: If April’s tax receipts “fell short of estimated amounts—for example, if capital gains realizations in 2022 were smaller or if U.S. income growth slowed by more in early calendar year 2023 than CBO projected—the extraordinary measures could be exhausted sooner, and the Treasury could run out of funds before July.”
There really isn’t a whole lot of time for the House GOP to spend trying to get their shit together, not considering how much time between now and July they won’t be in session, and not to mention the fact they’re a bunch of maniacs.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
