The Reckoner>
There's no ink drying yet on any agreement, but the gatekeepers and scorekeepers aren't letting the grass grow under their feet. America has once again flirted with its bout of Fiscal Chicken Theater -- a/k/a, the brouhaha over the debt ceiling -- and, while it's too early to breathe easily just yet, seems likely to survive, with minimal room to spare.
Now that the gory details are finally emerging, the only question that seems to grip the punditocracy, and its stenographers in the likes of The New York Times, and The Washington Post, is the elementary one. "Who won? Who lost? Who got served by whom?" the herd collectively thunders.
So goes the "baseball game/horse race/beauty pageant" model of MSM (mainstream media) coverage, as I call it, one that distills everything through a who's-won-who's down narrative, topped off by the predictably sketchy impressions of the players involved.
But what distills also distorts, as we know all too well. "It could have been worse" is the prevailing mantra being trotted out by MSM sages like Dan Pfeiffer: "People on the Left and the Right are unhappy, but that is to be expected. No deal gets the agreement of the Democratic president and the Republican Speaker and is universally praised.”
Perhaps. Possibly. Other outlets, like the New York Times, are casting the tentative deal as no worse than the sort that might emerge during budget negotiations in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives: "The agreement would protect the military and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare from spending cuts imposed on other parts of government.”
I suspect that this anguished Tweet served up on Saturday by Sarah Christopherson, legislative and policy director of Americans for Tax Fairness, a progressive think tank, captures the prevailing progressive mood more aptly:
"Jesus fucking
Christ. $10 b from tax enforcement in a big ol gift to rich tax
cheats; work requirements & time limits in SNAP & TANF to
push poor ppl deeper into poverty; NDD [non-defense discretionary*] cuts of 5% in real dollars. Is
there anything the White House didn't cave on?"
Ms. Christopherson is fundamentally accurate on every point. The poor, as they always do, got thrown under the bus; "It's the kidney machines that pay for rockets and guns," as Paul Weller observed in the Jam's 1980 classic, "Going Underground." Forty-odd-years later, it's saddening to see how little has changed since he wrote those lyrics.
And even a five percent spending cut for domestic programs, however small it seems, will have markedly negative consequences for those who depend on them. Wealthy tax dodgers also have reason to celebrate, since any undercutting of resources from already overmatched regulators will surely kneecap the Biden administration's publicly stated quest to make the tax code work for everybody.
As damaging as these outcomes are, however, they aren't the worst ones. Leading progressives, like Bernie Sanders, repeatedly urged Biden to stand up publicly to his antagonists, notably by invoking language in the 14th Amendment ("The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned"). Doing so, proponents argued, would allow Biden to bypass Congress altogether, and take the debt ceiling club off the table forever, at least, theoretically.
But that notion was always going to be a big ask of Biden, as a conventional politician who came up in a much more conventional era -- when games like Fiscal Chicken Theater simply didn't happen, because nobody envisioned their opposition pulling such a stunt to get their own way, at any cost.
Presumably, the various trial balloons that Biden trotted out publicly against invoking the 14th Amendment (I don't have time; It's an untested theory; It's too wacky to try; The markets wouldn't like it) sounded better than the obvious one he didn't say aloud (I won't do it, because it's never crossed my mind).
Would the high courts that right wingers have spent so much time and money to cherry pick really gone along with their brethren's attempts to blow up the economy over that untested 14th Amendment theory?
We'll never know, because nobody tried it. Certainly not President Biden. But even if they had, it's worth asking, who looks better here? The 99-year-old Granny Doe, faced with losing her Social Security check to pay rent? Or so-called Supreme Court justices scuba diving in Indonesia, thanks to some deep-pocketed patron with an unsettling fetish for Nazi memorabilia?
In the final analysis, this is the problem with orthodox liberals. Decades of legal and political dunking have beaten them down to the point of accepting stalemate as the only option that's worth pursuing. In this mindset, the mere avoidance of disaster is touted as some positive sign that the system works, however dysfunctional it's become. Sleepwalking through a tired script is preferable to flipping it, because the latter task requires too much effort.
Apparently, nobody feels compelled to remind Biden and his inner circle of Churchill's famous aphorism, uttered after Britain's retreat from Nazi troops on the shores of Dunkirk, in 1940: "Wars are not won by evacuations."
For evidence, look no further than Biden's equally vexing refusal to push for the expansion of a Supreme Court whose uber-right majority is working night and day to hobble his Presidency.
Would a Republican President, staring down a similar dilemma, stay so committed to such a resolutely passive course? If you believe that, I've got some Florida swampland you can all help me drain.
Until the Democrats make a stronger, more coordinated and disciplined push to unstuff and undo the various penalty boxes that they've been locked in, for decades -- the court captures, the filibusters, the gerrymanders -- their policy wishes will remain largely academic arguments, at best.
And yes, obviously, the next generation can't come onstage soon enough, as the gruesome spectacle of California Democrat Dianne Feinstein's ongoing cognitive decline amply demonstrates. Yet one moment of truth surfaced last week, amid reports of Feinstein's apparent inability to recognize her one-time colleague, Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to those reports, a befuddled Feinstein -- on seeing Harris acting in her major role, of presiding over the Senate -- asked her aides, "What's she doing here?"
It's a question that Feinstein, and most of the major players from her political generation. would do well to ask themselves, as well. Because if they ever asked us, they wouldn't like the answer they get. -- The Reckoner
[*Inserted here by yours truly, to fully explain the term, and avoid confusing the reader.]
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