Will House Democrats Help Sink the Debt Ceiling Limit Deal Bill? (UPDATE)
Will House Democrats sink the debt ceiling limit bill? So far the bulk of attention has been on the Tea Party Republicans, but Greg Sargant has a report suggesting House Democrats may be simply leaving it up to Republicans. If this is the case, it’ll hurt the Democrats: if it turns out that there is a perception that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to push for the bill, the onus will not be totally on the Tea Party Republicans if the bill fails — and the United States slips into default:
According to two Democratic leadership aides, Hoouse Dem leaders are not whipping Dems to get them to vote for the debt deal announced yesterday, raising questions as to whether it can pass the House.
Nancy Pelosi, who met with her caucus today to gauge support for the deal, has not announced yet whether she’s in favor of it. More specifically, the question of whether Dem leaders will actively press members is key to gauging the proposal’s prospects for success. And it looks like they aren’t.
“We are not whipping,” one leadership aide tells me. “We are doing a leadership survey to see where members are.”
MoveOn came out against the deal today, and Paul Krugman and some liberal bloggers are calling on House Dems to vote No on the plan. People are scrambling right now to gauge how many Dems and Republicans are currently supporting it.
Those on the Democratic left who are calling to defeat a plan to stave off default (no matter how they defend it) would — here goes the outcry over false equivency…get ready…it’s coming — be in the same political doghouse in the eyes of many Americans as those on the right if the bill is defeated and the U.S. slips into default. And then there is this: many Americans want this whole crisis to be put behind them — even though many Americans will be dealing with the far reaching consquences of this deal that essentially is another big step in dismantling New Deal and Great Society programs achieved after fierce political battles in the last century.
UPDATED: No sooner did I hit PUBLISH on my trusty WordPress control panel then this poll emerged that confirms what I noted above:
Americans give overwhelmingly negative reviews to the fierce budget debate that has transfixed Washington over the past few weeks, and large numbers now think less favorably about the country’s political leaders, according to a new poll by the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center.
Asked for single-word characterizations of the budget negotiations, the top words in the poll — conducted in the days before an apparent deal was struck — were “ridiculous,” “disgusting” and “stupid.” Overall, nearly three-quarters of Americans offered a negative word; just 2 percent had anything nice to say.
So even though Mommy said “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it,” many Americans of both or NO parties are revolted over what has passed for leadership from both parties on this politician-produced issue.
“Ridiculous” was the most frequently mentioned word among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. It was also No. 1 in an April poll about the just-averted government shutdown. In the new poll, the top 27 words are negative ones, with “frustrating,” “poor,” “terrible,” “disappointing,“ “childish,” “messy” and “joke” rounding out the top 10.
May I say the word?
DITTO.
5 Responses to “Will House Democrats Help Sink the Debt Ceiling Limit Deal Bill? (UPDATE)”
Why would dems be in the political doghouse if they chose not to give into GOTP extortion? Let’s try to be clear on who it was made this “agreement” so difficult. There is nothing responsible about caving in to partisan extortionists.
What’s important is that some Dems, at least, have formally acknowledged (the miracle!) and conceded to reality, that the fiscal problem is spending (most importantly, entitlements), and what is expected of government in Washington (unrealistically as well as excessively), we also may Hope [tm], and they’ve now flirted with it (true constructive, positive Change [tm]). They approve spending cuts.
The agreement is godawful, full of gimmicks and mechanisms nobody informed trusts. It has other gimmicks, like Obama’s pet Pell Grant funding (how truly weird as well as irresponsible, notably in a budget that reduces excessive spending, meaning as part of that that which is non-essential, the kind that should be reduced or ended first). So that was Leader Obama’s big thing?
The point: an overdue precedent (including from Dems!) is now set.
Reduced spending ([gasp] go those who still have big problems)
* * *
It’s worth noting that here, again, we see failure to do truly bigger but also better things, like true tax reform that isn’t merely class warfare economy-and-morality soiling, but rather true and good reform, eliminating all those deductions, exceptions, and other special favors in the tax laws that really do cost the federal government money. (If GOP activists resist that, why? It, for so rare a real-world occasion, makes the GOP bad and wrong about such things. Why preserve some non-neutral, disruptive feature of the tax laws? Why?)
Note that that means getting rid of (or starting by reducing) all such mal-features in the tax laws, including that sacred cow, the mortgage interest deduction.
(Also due for ending are deductions for state and local taxes. I know it hurts, but the reasoning can’t be refuted: state and local taxes are for state government; federal taxes are for federal government. Complicated federal-intrusion and “co-mingling” arguments can be made in defense of the deduction, but I doubt in the end that would be enough to protect the deduction on a legal-logical basis.)
I’d also like to see governments forced to be honest, and pay real market interest rates on debt (yes, raising borrowing costs, not lowering them by doing this), and improve the income tax at the same time, by ending the tax deductibility of government debt (principal and notably interest payments). Don’t exempt it from the income tax. It’s income. (There’s here, too, good legal arguments — it’s simply being repaid for the time value of the money lent as well as the principal; that’s what interest is about. Hence it’s really not any kind of “profit” above repayment, not a real income, just as only realized, not unrealized, capital gains ought to be income and taxable.)
Oh, well. I’d like to see a rational property-tax system rather than the defective assessed-value-based system we have, too, but that’s even less likely to happen any time.
“Reviled,” Joe G. — not merely “repelled.”
The extremists, that is. Moderates (real ones) are irked by the stupid details of the plan, and have no faith in the purported future outcome, but it’s a relief to see Dems and the GOP acknowledge reality, that spending is the problem and spending cuts are needed.
An acknowledgement of and grown-up progress about the real world, a positive precedent, has been set.
Note that the credit ratings agencies properly know that reform is now needed, and raising the debt limit alone is insufficient; they may still lower the credit rating if they don’t like the budget plan.
They expect or want, for starters, $4 trillion in deficit reduction (in practice spending cuts, because spending is the problem), more than that later.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/08/01/sp-moodys-await-debt-plan-details/#ixzz1TpGD9QeZ
(Well, we’re due someday for an IMF austerity plan if we don’t reform.)
The Dems are even more stupid than the “tea party” GOP activists in the House if the Dems wreck the budget plan. They have no kind of legitimate complaint whatsoever about spending cuts, particularly when entitlements and other welfare programs are exempted so much. They have entitlements and other welfare programs, too, largely left alone, while subjecting the military, that they want to gut to spend the money on other preferred things, to arbitrary cuts that may truly harm it (not that some Dems at least wouldn’t object, no matter how insensible and how destructive).
There’s even the great, shining, Messian President-as-Parent lib and Dem example of Obama securing funding for Pell Grants.
[snicker]