Even a blind pig will find the occasional acorn.
In this case it’s a blind pig whose leash Chuck Schumer somehow got his hands on. A blind pig who takes direction from whoever has hold of his leash at the moment is going to find acorns exactly to the extent that he is guided to them by a competent handler. Here’s hoping Schumer can keep his hand on the leash, and to the exclusion of all the idiots who want to lead the blind pig in all the wrong directions. But hope is not a plan, and resting the hopes of a great nation on the permanence of some sort of Brooklyn boys’ bond between Trump and Schumer is really dicey.
That said, I am heartened by the fact that Schumer actually came out for ending the debt ceiling. That’s a no-brainer, as the ceiling is a vestigial remnant of an earlier era’s process for controlling govt spending. It has been replaced in that function by the annual budget reconciliation/consolidated spending bills. The ceiling survives as nothing more than yet another veto point for hostage taking and legislative chicken, without any useful purpose that might justify the risk to the system it introduces by giving us yet another veto point to something that has to happen or the US foes into default. To be sure, the spending process we have now has its own problems and its own unnecessary veto points, but those problems are worsened, not ameliorated, by the ceiling. The ceiling should be ended, not mended.
But as strong and obvious as the arguments for ending the debt ceiling are, it is surprising that a leader of even the party of (relative) sense and reason is willing to espouse that view. The ceiling can be made to appear, to people not paying close attention to the process, as if it is a needed bulwark of fiscal prudence that only reckless tax and spenders would want to get rid of it. I’m not aware that any prominent D has ever before come out openly for sense and reason on the subject of the ceiling.
You really have to reach to find cause for hope in the daily spectacle of ruin provided by the Trump administration. And, no, this episode of Trump, at least today, coming out for ending the debt ceiling does not in the least raise my hopes that he really has all along been some sort of Huey Long, and that from now on, he’s going to be a populist champion of good govt. He’s got dementia with behavioral disturbance. He’s given too much evidence of that to allow any hope that this one good thing he’s come out for means that he has any idea what he’s doing. But that Schumer, who has his faults but doesn’t seem to be at all demented, has come out for ending the debt ceiling, that is indeed a hopeful sign.
Maybe that’s what the Ds have needed the past 40 years, a complete R disaster of a trifecta lineup, to get us to finally come out for doing the right thing. Here’s hoping that Trump continues to have that effect on people in the system who are not completely blind pigs, that it gets them doing the right thing. That’s our way, we exhaust every possible stupid and cowardly approach until reality finally forces us to do the right thing.