Jonathan Cohn highlights two quotes. The first is from Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who recounted his recent conversation with the president at the White House.
Graham says at one point he told Obama that he can’t expect Congress to surrender its constitutional authority on spending matters.
“I understand where you’re coming from, protecting the presidency,” Graham says, characterizing his remarks to Obama, “but you can’t tell the Congress, ‘You will reopen the government, you will pass a continuing resolution and you will pass the debt ceiling, and then I will talk to you.’”
“As a body, we can’t give that authority away. We can’t be told by the executive branch of the government that ‘you have to do what I say when it comes to how you fund the government and raising the debt ceiling.’ That’s not healthy for future Congresses. The whole check and balance situation will be undermined there,” Graham adds.
Here, the important thing is that actually the president can and has told Congress to reopen the government, pass a continuing resolution, and pass the debt ceiling.
The second quote comes from David Drucker of the Washington Examiner, who explains the psychology of the House Republicans.
The issue isn’t whether House Republicans should accept a bad deal to raise the federal borrowing limit and ensure the U.S. does not default on its $16.7 trillion debt. Republicans are concerned that the refusal of President Obama and Senate Democrats to negotiate those issues with Republicans would establish a precedent making it impossible to haggle over future debt limit increases or to use them as leverage in other policy negotiations.
That has only reaffirmed to House Republican leaders — who wanted to avoid a government shutdown — that they have no choice but to stand their ground on the debt ceiling. Surrounded by a hostile White House and Senate, and with few legislative avenues beyond borrowing and spending bills to impose their agenda, Republicans said capitulating to Obama would cede to Democrats the only institutional authority Republicans possess.
Here, the issue is that this establishment of a precedent making it impossible to haggle over future debt limit increases and this elimination of the only institutional authority that the Republicans possess is the entire point of this confrontation from the Democrats’ point of view. The only quibble I have is that defaulting on our debts is not an “institutional authority.” But, otherwise, this battle has always been about taking the Republicans’ hostage-taking strategy away from them. It’s been about killing the precedent that the Republicans can win by acting like kidnappers.
Everyone who hasn’t put this simple idea foremost in their mind has probably misunderstood everything Harry Reid and President Obama have done and said.
The Republicans obviously don’t like this situation, but they are not going to default on our debts because of it. I have used a variety of terms to describe the Republicans’ actions during this crisis, including “leading with their chin” and “wingnuts roasting on an open fire,” but I think I will go back to driftglass’s construction: “they waddled into the threshing blades.”
