Catherine Rampell’s summary in WaPo of the ongoing debt ceiling debacle is really a summary of the consequences of one of my favorite wish-it-were-dead horses, toxic team culture.
To wit: [House Republicans] won’t raise taxes (to the contrary, they have pledged to cut taxes further); they won’t touch Social Security or Medicare; they won’t slash defense or veterans’ programs; and they won’t zero out the rest of the nondefense discretionary budget, as would be required if they chose to extend all the Trump tax cuts and took all those other spending categories off the table, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. …
Republicans, on the other hand, appear to have abandoned any pretense of a counteroffer. They have no budget, nor even the basic outlines of one.
In a letter in late March, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) accused the president of being “missing in action” on debt negotiations. Never mind, apparently, McCarthy’s lack of concrete positions of his own, beyond platitudes about “reducing excessive non-defense government spending” (which ones are excessive?) and advocating “policies to grow our economy and keep Americans safe, including measures to lower energy costs.” (Okay, how?)
Yeah. They won’t raise taxes, and, in fact, will exacerbate the situation by lowering them again, while swearing up, down, and sideways to leave so much of the budget alone during the cutting process that they actually cannot accomplish what they wish to do.
Here’s the raging clue: Reading about the ringleaders of this mess leaves one wondering just which asylum they have escaped from. Comer (SC), chair of the Oversight Committee, doesn’t seem to understand that big countries comes with big budgets, and that failing to raise the debt ceiling will enshrine our country as no longer trustworthy in the financial world; Gaetz (FL) wants to bring Federal agencies that investigate Republicans “to heel” or defund them; Greene (GA) of Jewish Space Laser fame foams at the mouth as she proclaims Democrats are pedophiliacs; Biggs and Gosar of Arizona are so scatterbrained I don’t know where to start; Boebert (CO) doesn’t seem to understand that the Establishment Clause really exists, and that no matter how many ways she asks a question, the unexpected answer remains the same (public urination in D.C.).
And Speaker McCarthy (CA) runs around making random, useless remarks. We’ve gone from one of the most effective Speakers in modern times, Pelosi (D-CA), to someone whose guiding principle appears to be What do I need to say and do to hold my position? There’s no hint of a real, live moral principle in McCarthy’s public pronouncements. Just studying what he says makes me see him as a deer in human clothing, staring blankly at the oncoming car lights.
And how do they get elected in the first place? Standard political wisdom states it with brevity: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. That’s right, they line up and vote for the Republican candidate without discretion. This is the rule for general elections; primaries, on the other hand, can degenerate into appalling brawls. Just ask former Congressman Mo Brook (R-AL), accused of supporting the Islamic State during a Senate primary run. (Brooks, himself an extremist, came in third.)
Why?
Experience and moderation are no longer important, and are in fact burdens; it’s about ideology. Abortion: Evil. Taxes: Evil. Regulation: Bad. Democrats: Evil. Deep State: Persecution. Compromise: Evil. Losing: Evil (see Kari Lake (R-AZ)). Guns: Unlimited good. Look at how Republican primaries go these days: candidates exhibit how extreme they can get on the various issues mentioned, plus a few more, and then sit back and hope their performative ideology appealed. An incumbent exhibiting any violation of “the rules” instantly becomes vulnerable to being primaried by some bozo who has no problem backing every single one those rules, whether they personally believe in them or not.
And why does that work?
Because the idea of honor has been banished in favor of Gingrich’s Dictum: Win at any cost. The primaries, as I noted, are already a circus, to the extent that Democrats have been over-performing using Republican admissions and accusations.
But it’s important to extend those “rules” to understand why Republicans don’t seem to understand how America works anymore. Anyone paying attention knows that many Republicans continue to talk about and put forward laws restricting abortion now that Dobbs‘ has overturned Roe. They didn’t get it, pundit and candidate alike, in the 2022 election, and as a result, it’s fairly argued, the Democrats lost just a few seats, instead of the projected sixty, in the House, and shocked the political world by picking up an empty seat in the Senate, shifting the balance of power further to the Democrats.
Yet, local and national Republican legislators openly discuss and put forward proposals to restrict abortion.
When you’re a fourth-rater, yeah, that’s what you do. Persuasive arguments? Nyah. Watch the polls and see how their keystone issue of abortion is going for them:
Not at all persuasive. And are they paying attention? No. The Republican epistemic bubble, reinforced by their default labeling of anything anti-Republican as evil, prevents them learning that their positions are not respected. Oh, not all Republicans, but the elected officials, those that Erick Erickson, conservative/extremist pundit, actually has to yell at, don’t seem to get it.
The “rules,” along with a healthy dose of profound arrogance, leads them to think that by achieving a law, they’ve won. They’ll have gained the Promised Land and it’ll never be taken away.
But it doesn’t work that way. If you can’t persuade through argument, and people refuse to be ashamed in the face of vulnerable women dying, well, that poll is a predictor that any abortion-restriction laws that are passed will be prime targets for repeal when the women of America get their act together and bounce the anti-abortion partisans out on their heads. It may take a while, but it will happen. Bloody death trumps bad reasoning, even with a possibly non-existent God being invoked, mistakenly, by everyone.
So the entire House mess, led by McCarthy, is actually easy to understand how it arises from the toxic team politics of the Republican Party – and why the current iteration of the Republicans is doomed to implode, eventually.
