House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden reached a deal last night to raise the debt ceiling and prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations.
Is it a good deal? Who will bear the burden? Should it have ever gotten to this point? Did Biden blow it?
These questions will be debated endlessly over the next weeks and perhaps months, but one of them is relevant right now.
The only relevant question is whether Republican McCarthy and Democrat Biden, the US president, along with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic congressman from New York, can cobble together a majority to pass it before 5 June.
That’s when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the US will run out of funds to pay its bills.
I believe they can, because they must. There’s no time for further negotiations, and neither side would give anything else away. The deal is done.
But the Maga right crazies in the House – anywhere from 28 to 123 by my measure – may not go along, especially if former US president Donald Trump says it’s a bad deal. Which means additional House Democrats will have to agree to it.
Will they? Here’s where the asymmetry between House Republicans who don’t believe in government and House Democrats who do comes into play.
Progressive Democrats will object to the freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs and additional work requirements on the recipients of food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as unfair and unnecessary.
But most House Democrats will go along with the deal because they believe in government, and they don’t want the US to default – with potentially cataclysmic consequences domestically and internationally.
Many in the House Maga crowd, on the other hand, will see this vote as an opportunity to show their supporters that they’re willing to blow up the system, because they were voted in on their promise to blow up the system.
Whether the deal is good or bad is irrelevant. It’s the only deal. The alternative is chaos.
Republicans have succeeded in holding the nation hostage, and now we must pay the ransom that’s been negotiated.
What happens from here depends on how many members of the House prefer governing to chaos.
