Absurd Problems Like The Debt Ceiling Calls For An Absurd Solution

Truer words were never spoken: Biden Accuses Republicans of Being ‘Reckless’ Over Debt Limit Increase:

President Biden excoriated Republicans on Monday for blocking his party’s efforts to raise the debt ceiling weeks before a projected government default, calling their tactics “reckless” and “disgraceful” and warning they risked causing “a self-inflicted wound that takes our economy over a cliff.”

“As soon as this week, your savings and your pocketbook could be directly impacted by this Republican stunt,” Mr. Biden said, cautioning that a failed vote could rattle financial markets, sending stock prices lower and interest rates higher. “A meteor is headed for our economy.”

Republicans bear a share of responsibility for Washington’s ongoing budget deficits and must at least allow an up-or-down vote, as has been the case under previous presidents. Filibustering the debt ceiling is an act of terrorism, pure and simple.

The Sedition Party is a domestic terrorist organization engaged in a slow-motion insurrection designed to undermine the U.S. government and to cause harm to Americans. This is not normal and no one in the media should be trying to normalize this terrorist behavior. Treat these seditious insurrectionists as the domestic terrorists they are.

Greg Sargent writes, Biden’s challenge to Mitch McConnell: Go ahead, burn the place down:

On Monday, President Biden shocked the political world by refusing to promise that the battle over the debt limit will be resolved without the United States defaulting on its debts, which would unleash economic calamity.

“No, I can’t,” Biden said, when asked whether he could guarantee resolution. “That’s up to Mitch McConnell.”

It’s anybody’s guess whether this effort by Democrats to ratchet up pressure on [this domestic terrorist, the “Grim Reaper of Demoracy,”]  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will actually work … But here’s one thing we can say right now: Biden’s declaration sets up the possibility for an endgame to all this that Republicans might not have anticipated. If this continues, it will soon become overwhelmingly clear that Republicans face a stark choice: Either they drop their filibuster, or we default.

But what will the “Terrible Two,” the Grim Reaper’s enablers Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema do? Will they still insist that the archaic Jim Crow relic of the Senate filibuster rule be preserved even in the face of a catastrophic default on the U.S. debt, which is a violation of a Constitutional duty to honor the full faith and credit of the debts incurred by the U.S. government.

McConnell has benefited overwhelmingly from the failure of media coverage to convey with real clarity precisely what Republicans are doing here. Oozing with bad faith, McConnell keeps insisting he just wants Democrats to raise the debt limit by themselves, offering this idea as though it’s the most reasonable notion in the world, packaged with his usual smarmy smirk.

It’s nonsense, of course. The idea that it’s solely Democrats’ responsibility to deal with the debt limit when they control Washington is another McConnell invented rule. Democrats and Republicans repeatedly suspended the debt limit under the last GOP president, when much current debt was racked up (and the debt limit is only about covering obligations already incurred).

More to the point, Republicans are filibustering Democratic efforts to suspend the debt limit. They’re actively blocking Democrats from doing what McConnell himself says he wants — that is, for Democrats to deal with this alone. He’s doing this to force Democrats to avert catastrophe in the reconciliation process, to disrupt their push for a multitrillion-dollar social policy bill.

Democrats are refusing to use reconciliation on the debt limit – there is not enough time to go through this process, and this still leaves us with the “Terrible Two” problem with Manchin and Sinema – and Biden’s new comments indicate that they appear determined to hold to this course.

(The reconciliation option that Democrats should take seriously would be to try to use that process to nullify the debt ceiling entirely. But once again, the “Terrible Two,” The Grim Reaper’s enablers Sens. Manchin and Sinema.)

Biden argued, if Republicans are not willing to help deal with the problem, they must at least drop their filibuster and let Democrats deal with it. “They need to stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy,” Biden said, which appears to mean he’s going to try to force them to relent.

[The] choice for Republicans will be incredibly stark: Either they stop filibustering, or we default. All the game-playing will fall by the wayside. No matter how many times McConnell disingenuously pretends he only wants Democrats to handle this themselves while Republicans block this from happening, and no matter how many times McConnell is credulously portrayed as a savvy operator for doing so, as the days tick down to Armageddon, that will be his choice.

Um, I’m sorry, but these are the same seditious insurrectionist Republicans who tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6. They do not care that they harm the U.S government or the American people. They will actually burn the place down in the hope of building a fascist white Christian nationalist government on the ruins of American democracy. These domestic terrorists have a different incentive structure.

If Republicans continue regardless, Democrats may in turn have no choice but to carve out an exception to the filibuster to deal with the debt limit themselves. That might open the door for more carve-outs on the filibuster later.

Broken record, but the flaw in this plan is the “Terrible Two,” The Grim Reaper’s enablers Sens. Manchin and Sinema.

Greg Sargent’s colleague, Jennifer Rubin, makes the same flawed argument. Biden has laced into McConnell on the debt ceiling. Now it’s time for an ultimatum. (excerpt):

Actually, the president and Democrats could guarantee we will not face an economic meltdown. All Democrats need do is declare (via a vote with all 50 members plus the vice president) an exception to the filibuster for the debt ceiling so that Democrats can pass the debt-limit increase.

“All Democrats need to do …,” she makes it sound so obvious and simple. Have you met the “Terrible Two,” the Grim Reaper’s enablers Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema?

There could be no better reason to disarm an unhinged and deliberately destructive minority that is taking the country hostage solely to make some cheesy ads claiming Democrats ran up the debt. Why should any minority have the power to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States? It’s time to tell Republicans: Get out of the way, or Democrats will punch a hole in the filibuster.

That’s all well and good, but will the “Terrible Two,” the Grim Reaper’s enablers Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema do?

Because today’s Republicans are utterly irresponsible, they should not have a Senate rule preventing the other side from saving the country from ruin. Biden and Democrats would be wise to seize the opportunity to make that case.

Since we cannot rely on the unreliable “Terrible Two,” Sens, Manchin and Sinema to do what is obvious and necessary, other options have to be considered.

Zachary Carter writes, The debt ceiling is an absurd problem. Only an absurd solution can save us.:

Fortunately, it can be resolved with a preposterous, silly and perfectly painless legal trick: minting a single platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion or more.

[S]enate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) actually likes the politics of universal Republican opposition — he wants to brand the GOP as “the party of default” — but he contends that the formal process for holding a debt ceiling vote cannot be completed before the default deadline without Republican support.

This is why House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) wants the Biden administration to mint a platinum coin. Under an obscure provision of a federal appropriations law passed in 1996, the president can authorize the Treasury to mint platinum coins at any face value it chooses. (Sorry goldbugs, the coin really does have to be platinum.) The Treasury could mint, say, a $1 trillion coin, deposit it at the Federal Reserve and then use the funds to pay the government’s obligations without incurring additional debt, obviating the need to borrow any more money for as long as the Biden administration would like — just as if it had a trillion $1 bills on deposit in a bank. And no, you don’t need to lose any sleep over the prospect of the coin being stolen. Nobody would accept it as payment (imagine making change for $1 trillion!), and anyway, the Treasury could always mint another one.

This was something of a joke when it was first popularized by a lawyer named Carlos Mucha during the 2011 debt ceiling standoff. It was a clever, silly and extremely efficient solution to a very dangerous problem — but not many people thought it would actually happen. A decade later, during yet another artificial debt limit crisis, it seems like an idea whose time has come.

[S]trange as it is to consider, minting a coin with a ridiculous number of zeros is the most responsible way for President Biden to resolve this situation. Congress could functionally eliminate the debt ceiling by holding a vote to raise the limit to, say, $1 quadrillion. But the political and practical hurdles for that vote would remain, and a $1 quadrillion coin would be just as good.

The debt ceiling was never designed to be a weapon of destruction. Legislators should not have the power to threaten global financial calamity in pursuit of increasingly petty partisan aims. With a platinum coin or two on account at the Fed, the debt ceiling could be rendered meaningless indefinitely, eliminating a wholly artificial and unnecessary source of crisis. Silly problems demand silly solutions.

Dylan Matthews makes the same argument. How Joe Biden could end the debt ceiling — all by himself (excerpt):

Luckily, there is a way out of this dilemma: ending the debt ceiling once and for all.

The obvious solution, proposed by Georgetown Law professor and congressional procedure expert David Super, would be for Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to eliminate the debt ceiling with a majority vote in the Senate. That path faces myriad procedural obstacles, though, and unless Congress moves decisively toward pursuing it, the Biden administration needs to start thinking about backup options.

Some of these options might seem unacceptably extreme. But an absurd crisis calls for absurd solutions. The Biden administration should, if Republicans in the Senate continue to promise a filibuster of a debt ceiling increase, unilaterally abolish the ceiling using executive powers.

There are at least four available to Biden, each with their own advantages and disadvantages:

• Minting super-high-value coins to fund the government
• Invoking the 14th Amendment to nullify the debt ceiling
• Issuing more debt as the “least illegal” option available to the Treasury
• Creating a new class of bond to fund the government while it cannot issue Treasury bonds

Each of these actions would effectively make the debt ceiling law a dead letter. Congress (or a minority thereof) would no longer be able to threaten default as a means of extracting concessions from the president, and the single biggest source of inter-branch conflict in the federal government would cease to exist.

The short-term political implications could be tough for the Biden administration to bear. But if the choice is between default and a presidential power grab, a power grab is the only defensible course of action. A responsible leader does not plunge his people into a wholly preventable financial crisis. If backed against a wall, Biden mustn’t flinch. He must kill the debt ceiling once and for all.

Dylan Matthews goes into greater detail on these options.

The point is, the country is being hostage by a tyranny of the minority, the “Grim Reaper of Democracy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and his GQP gang of seditious insurrectionists. They are refusing to do their Constitutional duty to honor the full faith and credit of the debts incurred by the U.S. government. They are domestic terrorists.

It appears that we are headed for a $1 trillion platinum coin, because we cannot rely on the unreliable “Terrible Two,” Sens. Manchin and Sinema to do what is obvious and necessary to overcome the domestic terrorism of the Sedition Party.

We are living in a theater of the absurd.