Sen. Chris Van Hollen bashed Republicans for the "insane situation" we're in now with the debt ceiling, and told Democrats to prepare for plan b, and c if necessary to prevent Republicans from crashing our economy. Talks between Biden and McCarthy are supposed to resume Monday, but, as Van Hollen warned on ABC's This Week on Sunday, "What we have right now is Speaker McCarthy and MAGA House Republicans saying that they are going to push the default detonator and blow up our economy if they don't get their way on their budget proposals. That would destroy the American economy."
Van Hollen pushed back against the notion that Biden hasn't put forth his own budget proposal, and hit Republicans for refusing to "accept one penny in deficit reduction from closing tax loopholes" on the very rich and large corporations. As he noted, "under Donald Trump, we raised the debt ceiling three times, 40 percent of our national debt actually was accumulated during the four years of the Trump administration. And now, and now, they are not willing to talk about any revenue from the very wealthy people as part of this effort."
Van Hollen made sure Raddatz understood the difference when she attempted to make a false equivalence between Republicans' hostage taking on the debt and Democrats being willing to accept any spending cuts.
"So, Republicans are saying if they don't get things their way, they're going to blow up the economy. That’s a very different position than what President Biden is saying," Van Hollen explained.
"President Biden is saying, look, let's sit down and find a reasonable way to reduce the deficit and debt. He put a trillion dollars of cuts on the table. But he is not saying if you don't do it my way, if you don't close these tax breaks for very rich people, I’m going to blow up the economy. And that’s the difference here."
After expressing concern that the markets are going to start to get shaky, Van Hollen discussed what Democrats' next move should be:
VAN HOLLEN: I think we need to move to plan B, which is what’s called a discharge petition in the House, which is where you have Republicans, we only need five, work together with all 213 Democrats to put together the kind of proposal that even about 30 Republicans we’re talking about as recently as May, which had the number of elements including cuts, but a number of other ingredients.
It seems to me we're going to have to move in that direction pretty soon.
RADDATZ: Plan B, Plan C -- the 14th Amendment that the president talked about, is that something you would consider still?
VAN HOLLEN: Well, let me just say, Plan A needs to be our focus for the next 48 hours. Plan B, which is a reasonable proposal, if Speaker McCarthy would just let the House work its will, we can have a discharge petition, we could get a majority in the House for a reasonable proposal to prevent default. Plan c would be the 14th Amendment. Look, my – my view is, the president should use all legal options out there. I think that is a legal option. But it’s not the preferred option because there’s a lot of uncertainty around that approach. It will be litigated.
If they can find five sane Republicans that would be the way to go for now. As we already discussed here, they've been quietly preparing for this possibility since January. No matter how this issue is resolved, I'd still like to see Democrats take this to court and get rid of this hostage taking for good.
