Debt Ceiling – Reminder
Just in case you thought we had entered a quieter period in our politics, allow me to remind you that the oddity known as the debt ceiling will be reached on November 3rd. That’s pretty soon.
More to the point Speaker John Boehner is complaining he doesn’t have the votes to pass legislation raising it.
That’s bogus, of course, he’s just posturing. He could strong-arm just enough of his recalcitrant Republican members to get something passed. That’s what he did last time.
If you recall – and I would easily forgive you if you forgot, so much has happened since – the last time we went through this entirely artificial charade of a legislative act, Boehner needed the entire Democratic caucus, 193 votes, to pass a limit increase. That way he needed only 28 of his own party to go along with him. The combined 212 votes was sufficient to get us past the so-called crisis that the more extreme Republicans wanted to foist on us.
Please let’s set aside references to theories about whether a debt ceiling is even needed – we complain about the indifference of textbook economics to reality plenty enough, we don’t need to inject highly stylized and unreal alternatives ourselves – the fact is that the debt ceiling is a reality we need to deal with. Yes it’s artificial. But deal with it we must.
The math for passing suitable legislation is somewhat more difficult this time.
The Republicans won more seats in the 2014 election, so there are only 188 Democratic votes this time. This, and turnover of Republican members as well, means that Boehner will have to persuade at least a dozen Republican who opposed the last limit increase to support a new one.
Will that happen?
Yes.
Why? because once Boehner knew he had enough votes to get the limit raised last time, he allowed some Republicans who had pledged support to cast a vote against, thus calming their rabid voters ahead of re-election campaigns. So there is a reservoir of Republican members who can be strong-armed into helping keep the economy afloat.
I suppose the oddity of that statement is not that there are GOP representatives in Congress who are willing to flip their votes, it is that they need to be strong-armed into keeping the economy afloat.
Isn’t it odd that the Republicans are so ideologically focused and driven by their extremist wing that preventing a melt down in our financial system has become the subject of intense parliamentary activity rather than a normal course of business? And they prattle on about patriotism. I wonder what they mean?
