MAGA Republican Hostage Takers Promise To Kill The Hostage If Their Extortion Demands Are Not Met

by

Dana Milbank writes at the Washington Post:

Speaker McCarthy defaults — on his promises

Advertisement

The IOUs Kevin McCarthy gave out to win the speakership are now coming due — and it appears the poor guy is going to default.

The California Republican promised right-wing holdouts that he would deliver a budget that balances within 10 years. But he also promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare. Republicans are likewise committed not to allow cuts to defense spending and veterans’ pensions, nor to allow the Trump tax cuts to lapse.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on those promises at Democrats’ request, and the results are in. To keep all those pledges, Republicans would literally have to eliminate everything — everything — else the government does. No more Homeland Security, no more Border Patrol or FBI, no more Coast Guard, air traffic control or federal funds for education or highways, no agricultural programs, no housing, food or disaster assistance, no cancer research or veterans’ health care, no diplomacy or space exploration, no courts — and no Congress.

Defund the police? This is defund America. Even then, Republicans would still be in the red after 10 years.

UPDATE: Marjorie Taylor Greene Attacks Joe Biden For Stopping Her From Denying Kids Food:

House Republicans are being advised to target cuts to food stamps (SNAP) as a part of their debt ceiling hostage-taking.

According to a report from Senate Democrats, the budget that Marjorie Taylor Greene is touting would gut the SNAP program, “At a time when more than one in eight households with children are food insecure, the Republican proposals cut $412 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”

According to the Census Bureau, 11.4% of American households receive SNAP benefits, and 48.6% of those households have a child under the age of 18. Children, seniors, and persons with disabilities make up the vast majority of Americans who are receiving SNAP.

The House Republican plan would take hundreds of billions of dollars in food assistance from children. Rep. Greene was attacking the President Of The United States because he would not agree to a plan that would take away food assistance from low-income children.

Republicans are targeting SNAP, Medicaid, changes to veterans benefits, and Social Security as part of their budget plan. The budget that Greene is so proud of would increase child hunger in the United States so that Greene and others could give more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.

President Biden is protecting America’s most economically vulnerable kids from Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy’s lieutenants are attempting some rapid backtracking. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) said this week that the 10-year balanced budget is now merely an “aspirational” target — much like my diet. He’s instead touting a separate House GOP proposal to set 2024 spending at 2022 levels, which would require smaller (though still severe) cuts but wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget.

Apparently, the 20 holdouts who almost denied McCarthy the speakership didn’t get the memo, for several of them assembled before the cameras Wednesday and declared they weren’t budging. “We’re going to present a budget that actually balances in the 10-year time frame,” proclaimed Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). He has said McCarthy’s promise of a 10-year balanced budget was “the whole thing”that led him to drop his opposition to McCarthy’s speakership in January.

Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) hosted Norman and several other anti-McCarthy holdouts, all members of the House Freedom [sic] Caucus, in the Senate television studio. There, they proclaimed their determination not to increase the debt ceiling without large spending cuts — even if that means the United States goes into a catastrophic default.

Lee revived the dangerously dubious idea that failing to raise the debt ceiling “is not a default.” “You can blow past the debt-ceiling increase deadline,” Lee said. “Yes, that causes problems … but that is not itself a default.”

The federal debt is causing “more suffrage for the American people,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who presumably meant “suffering.”

And Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) contributed this patriarchal take on Biden’s budget: “Every wife in America would shudder if that was her husband.”

The hard-liners, confused though they were, made clear that they weren’t wavering on the debt ceiling. “This is not the Republican Party of the past that will surrender,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.). “We made history in January,” he said of the anti-McCarthy holdouts. “You’re going to see us make history again.”

Only this time, it would be the historic collapse of the American economy.

Can anybody here play this game?

There is, theoretically, a deal to be had on the federal debt. It would have to be, as in years past, a “grand bargain” that would cut both domestic and military spending, raise taxes on the wealthy, and reform entitlement programs. But ruling out changes to all but the 15 percent of the federal budget known as nondefense discretionary spending, as House Republicans have promised, is a fool’s errand, destined to fail.

Problem is, this is a caucus full of fools — or at least a caucus of the clueless. They don’t know what they don’t know.

The median tenure for a House Republican right now is just four years. Most don’t know a time before Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the American political system. McCarthy himself acknowledged this week that “we have to retool and rethink” because of the inexperience: “About half the conference has never served in the majority.”

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) had a similar observation this week, as members of the House Freedom Caucus blasted what they called a “bailout” of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — even though the government’s guarantee of deposits prevented a broader banking panic. “It’s complicated and takes a little time for people to understand,” he said of his wet-behind-the-ears colleagues.

Their on-the-job training is off to a slow start. Three months into this new House majority, only two minor bills have become law: one rejecting the District of Columbia’s criminal code, and another declassifying what the federal government knows about the pandemic’s origins. As Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, a (rare) moderate Republican, told the Wall Street Journal: “We haven’t passed one of the must-pass bills this year.”

Yet the speaker claims that “we have changed Congress on its head in less than three months.”
In a way, he has changed Congress on its head — by executing a face plant.

David Leohardt asks at the New York Times, “Will the House be willing to cut programs that benefit G.O.P. voters?” A Republican Spending Problem:

As congressional Republicans prepare for a budget showdown later this year with President Biden, they say that they will insist on large cuts to federal spending. So far, though, they have left out some pretty important details: what those cuts might be.

Republicans have been more willing to talk about what they won’t cut. Party leaders have promised not to touch Medicare and Social Security. Republicans generally oppose reductions in military spending and veterans’ benefits. And neither party can do anything about interest payments on the debt that the government has already accumulated. Combined, these categories make up almost two-thirds of federal government spending.

The largest remaining category involves health care spending that benefits lower- and middle-income families, including from Medicaid and Obamacare. Hard-right Republicans, like some in the Freedom [sic] Caucus, have signaled they will propose reductions to these programs. Party leaders, for their part, have said they would eye cuts to anti-poverty programs such as food stamps.

But cuts like these would have a big potential downside for Republicans: The partisan shifts of recent years mean that Republican voters now benefit from these redistributive programs even more than Democratic voters do.

As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently wrote, “The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the G.O.P. wants to cut.”

Almost 70 percent of House Republicans represent districts where the median income is lower than the national median, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. By contrast, about 60 percent of House Democrats represent districts more affluent than the median.

The politics of class, as Brownstein puts it, have been inverted.

[T]he new class dynamic creates challenges for the Republican Party. For decades, it was the party that skewed affluent. It still had to manage the differences between its higher-income voters and its evangelical voters, but Republicans were mostly comfortable pushing for lower taxes and smaller government (other than the military). Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, embodied this outlook.

Donald Trump was able to engineer a hostile takeover of the party in 2016 partly because he recognized that many Republican voters had no interest in Ryan-style cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Trump promised to protect those programs and, unlike most Republican politicians, criticized trade deals. These positions helped him win the nomination and then the general election, as Matthew Yglesias of Substack has argued. In the 2024 Republican campaign, Trump is already using a similar strategy.

While Trump was president, however, he mostly did not govern as a populist. He acted more like a President Paul Ryan might have, cutting taxes on corporations and the affluent while trying to shrink Medicaid and repeal Obamacare. Those Trump policies weren’t popular. They contributed to the Republican Party’s huge losses in the 2018 midterms and probably hurt Trump’s re-election campaign too.

Polls show that even many Republican voters oppose cuts to government health care programs. The same message is evident in the outcome of state-level ballot initiatives: Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah have all voted to expand Medicaid.

The GQP dilemma

The Republican Party has not yet figured out a solution to this problem. If the party were guided solely by public opinion, it might put together an agenda that was well to the right of the Democratic Party on social issues while also calling for higher taxes on the rich. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bryan Bennett, who oversees polling at the Hub Project, a progressive group, told The Atlantic.

But the Republican Party retains enough of its wealthy base that it remains staunchly opposed to tax increases. Instead, Republicans say that the solution to the budget deficit involves less spending. But the specific cuts that they have talked about so far — like calls to reduce Medicaid and food stamps — don’t come close to balancing the budget. Other Republicans have talked about reducing the “woke bureaucracy,” but it is not clear what that would entail.

“The math doesn’t actually work,” my colleague Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress, said. “This is such a dilemma for Republicans.”

Adding to the challenge for Kevin McCarthy, the speaker, is the slim Republican House majority. McCarthy can lose only four votes and still pass a bill without Democratic support. “It is very hard to envision a Republican budget that can satisfy the Freedom Caucus and still get votes from Republicans in swing districts,” Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, told me.

Sometime this summer or fall, the U.S. government is likely to reach its debt limit. To avoid defaulting on debt payments — and risking a financial crisis — Congress will need to raise the limit before then, and Republicans say they will insist on cuts as part of a deal.

It will take a half dozen Republicans in the House to join with Democrats to roll their extremist MAGA leadership, and vote for Democratic bills that responsibly raise the federal debt ceiling and to enact a budget. Are there a half dozen Republicans willing to be patriots and to step up and save the country from the criminal hostage takers in the MAGA GQP who want to blow up the U.S. and world economies with their ideological ignorance? Who knows. They are all so cowardly and afraid to do the right thing. Unless and until they do, we are headed for an economic disaster entirely of MAGA Republicans’ making this summer.





Advertisement

Discover more from Blog for Arizona

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.