Jonathan Bernstein, at The American Prospect, tries to game out how the politics will unfold after a hypothetical government shutdown, but he ultimately decides that a shutdown is unlikely. Because we’re dealing with both a potential shutdown and a crisis over raising the debt ceiling, I think we need to consider this as a package deal. How likely is it that both scenarios will be avoided?
I continue to believe that we’re facing one of two situations. Either Boehner decides that he is willing to make a deal with Pelosi for Democratic votes, or we are going to probably have a government shutdown and almost definitely default on our debts. Bernstein doesn’t really entertain my scenario, in part because he’s assuming a shutdown for the purposes of his analysis.
I am pretty confident in my prediction because I don’t think Boehner can get his caucus to back down and pass a clean CR and a clean debt ceiling hike, and I don’t think he is willing to be responsible for defaulting on our debts. And his current strategy might make a government shutdown less likely, but the way he plans on proceeding makes a default more likely because he is arguing that the debt ceiling offers his caucus more leverage.
The way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before Boehner either runs out of options or decides to take preemptive action. Whether he cuts bait before the government shuts down or after is hard to predict, but I assume he won’t wait until after he’s destroyed our credit rating.
Ultimately a default will hang around his neck, and he knows it. He’s the “name guy” that is in the headlines. The others might become infamous in their own districts, but have the relative anonymity of being just another member of congress. They think they can slink away to their Cayman Islands retreats and forget about it all. Many of them are quite dumb.
I can’t see Boehner allowing it either. He’ll wait till the last minute and then hide behind John McCain while he allows a vote.
Exactly. Here’s how I see it.
Either a shutdown or a default will be extremely damaging to the country.
There is a way out.
That way out is entirely in Boehner’s hands.
All the Republican heavy hitters outside the Koch orbit (Rove, Chamber of Commerce) want to avoid even the shut down, let alone default.
Boehner wants to pander to his caucus as much as he can, and raise the insanity of Tea Party voters to a fevered pitch looking towards 2014, but he is well aware that no concrete victory is possible on the budget/ debt ceiling issue. Well, maybe the budget (though I doubt it), but certainly not the debt ceiling and certainly not the great white whale of defunding Obamacare.
Ergo: he caves at the last possible minute.
To me, an interesting question will be whether he does this with the minimum publicity (because he doesn’t want to alienate the base any more than absolutely necessary), or with the maximum publicity, because he wants credit for saving the country from a disastrous crisis (a crisis he himself created, but maybe he thinks people won’t notice that). The worst that can happen is, this will exacerbate the dissension and fragmentation that already exists within the party.
Or Obama caves and offers the Grand Bargain that he seems so eager for. I’d feel safer with either Pelosi (definitely) or even Reid handling the negotiations. And get Durbin to shut his mouth about “entitlements” too.
Obama’s not gonna cave. come on man.
Will progressives be played? Chained CPI and Keystone X, the zombies that never die. Is it too soon to fully demoralize the 2014 electorate? Is it possible to be too sour nowadays?
That’s what I’m wondering.
We still haven’t gotten an email telling us to prepare for a shutdown so it’s still possible to avoid, perhaps. I assume we’ll get something around Thursday or Friday. I know ill still have to come in shutdown or not because my “clocks” for my applications are still running, and the law mandates that any delay for any reason in the examination process gives applicants longer monopoly. The clocks therefore cannot be frozen.
I’ve noticed that Bill McBride at Calculated Risk had been saying a few weeks back that he was convinced that Congress would avoid a shutdown and a default – as he put it, Congress was being silly, but they’d do their job eventually. However, he’s seemed fairly silent more recently, and his last mention of it was in passing when discussing when the Fed might begin to taper QE3, and he seemed a bit more reserved about Congress doing its job. It’s easy for me to read into that a certain amount of pessimism has started to pervade his thinking. That blog has been a go-to for me for some time – McBride usually has good instincts.
Here’s a link to what I think is McBride’s latest.
One wild scenario is that McBride is right and then Cantor sticks a pitchfork into Boehner by making a deal with Pelosi for the Democratic caucus to support Cantor’s bid for the Speakership in exchange for a clean continuing resolution. Sounds right out of Hollywood but striking things like that preciptate realignments. I think Cantor is the weasel to do it to gain power and the support of Wall Street moneybags.
Could very well be. Interesting times we live in. Interesting times.
You are going to have to go into a little more detail here for this to be other than Kongressional kabuki.
What exactly shuts down and when in a government shutdown? And what happens to the incoming tax revenue if not, under the 14th amendment, going to paydown debt so that there is no default?
There are operations that have obligated but not spent their funds and can continue, unless an administrative order shuts them down. There is flexibility between some budget categories to permit shifting of funds to continue to operate.
There are expenditures that are drawn against trust funds that have positive balances. Under what sort of logic do those shut down?
There are contingency funds that can be borrowed against until Congress acts.
There are operations nearing completion in which acceleration of completion reduces expenditures.
And there are the things that the President can in fact do ranging from a suspension or forgiveness of US debts to the Fed, to the well-beaten horse of the trillion-dollar coin, to just blowing off the debt limit altogether, paying the debts and continuing programs to their budgeted authority.
The United States government will not actually default to its creditors on its debt. Period. It has never, and will not now do that. And President Obama will not be the first President to do so (of all Presidents). Pretending that that will happen is not credible. And credit rating agencies who argue that are playing politics like they did in 2011.
So that leaves a clean resolution and a “grand bargain” — yep that BS is being fed the media again.
The length of a shutdown depends on what gets shut down first. This time it should start with Congressional salaries and expenses; these nitwits need to get personally hit with their stupidity. The White House could share the pain just for the symbolism. And so could the Supreme Court justices. Then rolling cuts from the top. Political appointees and military brass first, and so on.
That is, if you want this to end well politically, which sometimes I wonder about Democrats. And why the word “feckless” is so often used about Democratic politicians.
Boehner has caved. The question is who will Boehner cave to.
Yes, let Repubs have their shutdown and let them see what happens when the (Repub) legislature cedes all financial authority to the (Dem) executive.
They need to see some 100mph bean balls coming at them and their various “interests”…and if they want to go cryin’ to Uncle Johnnie Roberts and his Repubs, let them.
Won’t happen. Look at the sequester. All contract employees were exempted from furloughs so that the burden fell on career employees. The Schedule C’s and top brass will NOT be sequestered. That’s not how the system works.
P.S.
It was probably some contract employee that wrote the sequester implementation. they seem to be doing all governmental functions these days.
While it’s great fun watching the experts on procedure and substance make their predictions about what an alcoholic “conservative” white male of below-average intelligence will “do” in the next 8 days to avoid a national meltdown, remember what we are actually talking about.
Our paralyzed Repub Congress, whom the Founders envisioned as the primary branch of government, cannot agree to keep the doors of the nation’s federal bureaucracy open, or agree to authorize the Treasury to obtain funds for debt service and already enacted programs and legislation. This is the equivalent of legislation with training wheels. It shouldn’t take 10 minutes of a functioning national legislature’s schedule. With Repubs in power, the nation can’t even take off the training wheels. Riding up the big-boy hill is out of the question. We are a global embarrassment, Shame and Honor boyz…or at least we should be embarrassed.
When today’s “conservatives” cannot come to basic agreement on such necessary and frankly uncontroversial topics, then it is quite clear that absolutely nothing of consequence can ever be expected of our national legislature. And an advanced country without a functioning national legislature is a failed state. We are utterly adrift in the USS Repub, without rudder or sails. That’s “conservatism”!
T’would be an embarrassment if there weren’t other nations rushing down (or being forced down) the same austerity road with the same political dysfunction. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal…have all been through this nonsense. The fact that we have clowns like Louis Goehmert to jazz up the show doesn’t mean that other folks parliaments have not been as ridiculous in their arguments.
It should be noted that part of the reason those countries are going through it is because of German aggress–I mean economic ascendancy.
Yes, and the German Conservatives just won re-election.
The Germans are keeping all THEIR social programs and benefits so of course they’ll vote for the conservative. We got ours, screw those dirty people to the south of us.
(I lived there for 4 years, so this isn’t just idle speculation from far away.)
I did notice that Die Linke (a socialist party) is now the third largest party in Germany. If I can find it, there was this cool graphic circulating around Tumblr showing how Die Linke’s support varies considerably between the former East German and West German territories.
Ah, but who would they screw harder, Latins/Greeks or Turks?
That seems to about nail it.
Teabaggers just won’t seem to accept the results of last year’s election and the fact that it means Obamacare isn’t getting repealed.
I wonder what would happen if you told them that the election was measured in Arabic numerals?
Cameron Joseph, The Hill: Eyeing GOP grassroots, Senate candidates embrace shutdown threat
So it is the funders of these members of Congress who are all excited about the kabuki. And for Ford O’Connell, a paid strategist, “grassroots” really means “within district funders of the guys who are likely to hire me in 2014”.