In a Fox Business interview Thursday, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) tried to clear up what exactly Republicans want to cut in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Tried is the key word because, well… they have no idea.
This comes shortly after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and President Biden met at the White House. The two sat down on Wednesday to discuss …
Biden: You’re really dumb, aren’t you?
Qevin: I don’t understand what you mean.
Biden: Exactly.
We must cut the defense budget in order to save the country from death at the hands of critical race theory.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Two years after a Democratic president took office and pushed ambitious policies through Congress, Republicans have regained control of the House. They don’t have the votes required to repeal the president’s achievements, but a quirk of U.S. law — which requires that Congress vote a second time to authorize the borrowing that results from already enacted spending and tax legislation — seems to give them an opportunity to engage in blackmail, threatening to create a financial crisis unless their demands are met.
Actually, however, you haven’t heard this before. True, there are some parallels with the debt ceiling crisis of 2011. But there are also huge differences. Elite opinion has changed — the debt obsession that gripped Very Serious People in the media and beyond a dozen years ago has vanished. Democrats also seem made of sterner stuff, much more determined to resist extortion.
But the most important difference is that this time Republicans aren’t making coherent demands. It’s completely unclear what, if anything, they want in exchange for not blowing up the economy. At this point they’re blackmailers without a cause.
Some of the reporting I’ve seen on the debt standoff describes Republicans as unable to agree on which spending should be cut. This might give the impression that there are factions within the G.O.P. that have different priorities. But as far as I can tell, no influential players within the party are advocating anything that might make a significant dent in the budget deficit, let alone achieve the balanced budget Kevin McCarthy promised as part of the deal that made him speaker.
As always, the fundamental fact about the budget is that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military dominate spending, and it’s impossible to do much about deficits unless you either raise taxes — which is obviously not part of the G.O.P. playbook — or make major cuts to these programs.
In the past, Republicans did try to change safety net programs in ways that would in effect have amounted to major cuts. George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. Republicans almost made a deal with President Barack Obama that would have reduced Social Security cost of living adjustments and raised the age of Medicare eligibility. In 2017 Paul Ryan, speaker of the House at the time, declared that he had been “dreaming” of cutting Medicaid since his college days.
But the G.O.P., perhaps remembering the political backlash after Donald Trump tried to dismantle Obamacare, has since become much more cautious. McCarthy has already declared that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table”; if his party ever gets around to making specific proposals, it will find out that Medicaid, which covers even more Americans than Medicare, is also extremely popular, even among Republicans.
Nor is political caution the only reason Republican leaders have become reluctant to attack the safety net. The G.O.P. base has also lost interest in spending cuts, turning its attention to culture wars. As my colleague Nate Cohn recently noted, in early 2021 far more Republicans reported having heard about a decision to stop publishing some of the Dr. Seuss books than about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion spending bill.
Inevitably, some Republicans are trying to make the budget a culture-war issue, claiming that large sums can be saved by eliminating “woke” spending. But what spending are they talking about?
I’ve been trying to find specific examples of federal outlays that conservatives consider woke, bearing in mind that right-wing think tanks and politicians have a strong incentive to find big-ticket items that sound outrageous. The results of my search were, well, embarrassing. For example, the spending listed in a Heritage Foundation report thundering against “woke earmarks” totaled about $19 million — less than the federal government spends every two minutes.
So the bottom line on the debt crisis is that there is no bottom line: Republicans denounce excess spending, but can’t say what spending they want to cut. Even if Democrats were inclined to give in to extortion, which they aren’t, you can’t pay off a blackmailer who won’t make specific demands.
Unfortunately, the emptiness of Republican fiscal posturing is no guarantee that we’ll avoid a debt crisis. If anything, it may make a crisis more likely. MAGA may lack policy ideas, but it’s rich in nihilism; Republicans don’t know what policies they want, but they definitely want to see Biden fail.
So far, the Biden administration’s strategy seems to be to flush Republicans out of hiding, force them to propose specific spending cuts, then watch them retreat in the face of an intense public backlash. There are also, I presume and hope, contingency plans to avoid crisis if this strategy fails.
But it’s hard not to be worried. It’s dangerous when a political party is willing to burn things down unless it gets its way; it’s even more dangerous when that party just wants to watch things burn.
I’m against killing Democrats and blowing them up.
a non-woke defense
There is nothing worse in this world than a defense that kills people and blows stuff up without knowing why people are being killed and stuff is getting blown up.
From Paul Krugman’s article I posted above about the “massive woke spending” Republicans are complaining about.
Whatever you say, tough guy.
There’s that word again. “Congressman Roy, I’m not entirely clear what the word “woke” means. Can you explain it for me?”
Just once I want that question asked.
Word salad! Where is the policy proposal? They have no idea how to actually govern. Own the libs is the best they can offer.
Sad!
Someone should ask this jackass if he supports sending arms to Ukraine, because that’s where our military is actually in a proxy fight where we’re killing people and blowing stuff up. So he supports the Ukraine aid, right? Big badass booms going on over there right now.
Chip Roy is exactly the kind of leader Sun Tzu would want for the opposing side.
When I was a kid, the now-deprecated “R word” was considered the “correct” word. Being kids, we used it in other ways that actually hurt people because we applied it somewhat … indiscriminately. I get it. Hurtful. I don’t use it any more in any context.
But back then, this guy would be branded with the R word and it would probably have an F word adjective in front of it.
Clueless just doesn’t carry the weight that the old word did, even though he is clearly without clue.
Is there a good, not-hurtful-to-innocent-bystanders substitute word? What word to #TheKidsToday use?
(I really don’t mean to demean the people who crusade against the R word - really. I get it. I just need a substitute).
All while we’re asleep, right?
“By the way, a non-woke defense, that is actually trying to do the job of lethality of killing people and blowing stuff up. That’s what the defense is supposed to do.”
Well Chip, that sounds more like offense and not defense. The only clear, present and existential threat to the country is the Republican Party, fund defending against that.
Moron still works for me. Or Clueless Halfwit if you want a longer phrase.
I don’t know about the Kids, but sheep or sheeple might work in some instances. I mean Republicans like to gather together and “baa”/bleat a lot.
Chip must have dropped some serious acid in a previous life (B.C: Before Congress). The dude’s mind is fried. It’s got the word “woke” on a continuous loop.
Yep, I live in this asshole’s district.
Yeah, they don’t want to upset Putin. We should have sent the ~450 ex-Marine Abrams - yes I know logistics blah blah blah, but I’m assuming they don’t instantly break down once you take them off the train/truck and if you can gas them up 1-2 times, with your older tanks to support/consolidate territory after they make a breakthrough, you can go find and fix them afterwards.
That’s assuming that 80% of them can go ~300 miles without breaking down. I’m not sure how true that is.
Also send all the ATCMS
The two “good” outcomes from this whole Ukraine thing (as much as good can come out of war that has killed 200,000 people are:
