“May you live in interesting times,” reputedly an ancient Chinese curse, comes to mind in the aftermath of this week’s fiasco as all signs point to hostage-taking as the new political norm rather than an aberration.
“The debt ceiling should not be…used as a gun against the heads of the American people,” the President says, but Mitch McConnell sees it differently.
“Never again,” the Senate GOP leader warns before untying the economy from the railroad tracks, “will any president, from either party, be allowed to raise the debt ceiling without being held accountable for it by the American people and without having to engage in the kind of debate we’ve just come through.”
This news comes as his junior partner Mike Lee, who upset long-time Utah conservative Robert Bennett in 2010, forms a new Tea Party fundraising committee to “find and support candidates for federal office who share my view that federal government has become too big and too expensive.”
Hatch and Lee have cooked up a proposed balanced budget amendment to limit spending to 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product and require Congressional supermajorities to raise taxes, which has Democratic incumbents scrambling to devise a less toxic alternative.
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