Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy conducts a news conference at the Capitol, March 24, 2023.
House Republicans are in a fix. They had a simple, devious plan: take the debt limit hostage, and institute massive changes to the federal budget. But they cannot agree on either the list of demands for the former, or the specific budget changes they want for the latter. The New York Times reports that, with deadlines approaching, the party caucus can’t even decide on whether or not to balance the budget, much less the specific ways to get there. The newest demand is that the country be put “on a path towards” a balanced budget, an approximately meaningless phrase. Axios reports that this has strengthened Democrats’ decision to play hardball: demanding a clean debt limit increase and no negotiations on the budget until Republicans can present their own offer.
That’s Republicans for you—equal parts wildly extreme and so chaotically stupid that they can’t even decide what extreme thing to do. We should expect nothing less from this party.
One aspect of this story is the utter intellectual debasement of the conservative movement. Its policy apparatus used to be dominated by Ayn Rand acolytes like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who advanced a nakedly plutocratic agenda of welfare and social insurance cuts, deregulation, and tax cuts for the rich. His plans as written relied on ludicrous “magic asterisk” assumptions to get acceptable budget numbers. But at least there was a discernible program there: hand money to the rich by cutting social programs and blowing up the deficit.
Donald Trump proved there was basically no organic appetite for this agenda in the conservative base, when he won the 2016 Republican primary promising to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Ryan eventually snuck out of town.
While in office, Trump allowed his staffers to propose massive welfare cuts, and actually did pass giant tax cuts for the rich, because he paid almost no attention to policy details. And one does still hear Randian notions from some GOP members of Congress. But much of the rest of the party is clearly not that keen on the old program anymore, particularly regarding Medicare and Social Security. Cutting those programs is nightmarishly unpopular, particularly with the base of seniors at whom the GOP targets their nostalgic MAGA messages. More importantly, Trump has returned to his old stance in his primary campaign against Ron DeSantis, who was a die-hard welfare cutter when he served in the House. Trump still rules the GOP, and the rest of the party is loath to cross him.
More importantly still, a large and growing swath of Republicans simply do not know or care about budget details. National conservative attention revolves around people like Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—loud, incurious idiots who say paint-blisteringly extreme things to get attention, typically accusing Democrats of imagined heinous crimes. Greene in particular—who was previously best known for filming herself chasing after a school shooting survivor shouting delirious conspiracy nonsense and threats at him—is virtually a shadow Speaker of the House now.
A large and growing swath of Republicans simply do not know or care about budget details.
Many up-and-coming Republicans plainly now view national office as a springboard to stardom in right-wing media—the Congress-to-podcast circuit, as it were. Former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who spent most of his staff money on comms rather than policy, was only a few steps ahead of the trend. (It seems he was also ahead of the curve with his alarming fixation on Nazi memorabilia, given the reporting about Republican megadonor Harlan Crow’s collection of Hitler possessions.)
So for the extreme right that dictated terms to McCarthy so he could become Speaker, the budget and the debt limit are almost entirely performative identity signifiers. They do want enormous spending cuts, because that’s the “most conservative” thing to do (read: it’s the opposite of what Democrats want). But they are basically indifferent to the detailed implications. So if cutting Social Security and Medicare is off-limits, as well as the military and the Trump tax cuts, the Republican far right naturally assumes they’ll balance the budget by cuts elsewhere.
The problem is that, as the Congressional Budget Office pointed out in March with an air of palpable exhaustion, it would be impossible to achieve that even if the GOP zeroed out every single other program in the entire federal government.
All this stuff is just so boring on the right. Fussy details about “the actual size of government programs and agencies” or “the duties of holding federal office” or “elementary arithmetic” are for blue-haired social justice warrior communists. Passing a responsible budget or not defaulting on the national debt doesn’t get you on Fox News or boost your podcast subscriptions. Indeed, it might hurt those things if an opportunistic pundit or politician decides to denounce you as a RINO for doing what’s right for the country. The conservative movement is on to harder stuff now, chasing the dragon of boycotting Bud Light, book and abortion bans, vicious transphobia, kicking Black people out of the state legislature for speaking out of turn, and pardoning a convicted murderer if his victim was liberal. Annoying technical responsibilities just don’t make for compelling television that can produce conservatives’ favorite emotional state, namely fits of apoplexy.
So instead of ironing out some compromise deal, thus far conservatives have reacted to the impossibility of their set of priorities by bitter infighting and mutual recriminations. McCarthy reportedly is deeply distrustful of both his lieutenant House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), because the extreme right tried to get him instead of McCarthy into the Speaker’s chair, and Budget Committee chair Jodey C. Arrington (R-TX), because he is “incompetent” and kept going to reporters with plans that didn’t have McCarthy’s backing.
It turns out to be quite difficult to operate a political party made up of 75 percent crack-brained yahoo attention hounds, whose voters are “egged on by a media apparatus that has trained its audience to demand the impossible and punish the sell-outs who can’t deliver,” in the words of Alex Pareene.
As a closing comment, readers might be surprised to learn that these kinds of high-stakes battles over the debt limit and the budget weren’t a thing for most of American history. The debt limit only dates back to 1917, and nobody even thought to take it hostage for decades. When the possibility did arise, the “Gephardt rule” ensured for many years that when the House passed a budget, it also automatically raised the debt ceiling as necessary—like how a functioning country would do it.
On the budget side, before 1980 there was no such thing as a government shutdown. If Congress failed to pass a budget, then all the agencies and programs kept on operating on their status quo track, with the assumption that sooner or later the legislature would get around to it and authorize the required funding. But in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s attorney general Benjamin Civiletti, with the cramped, hyper-literalist, and politically idiotic style of reasoning that is so characteristic of the elite liberal legal establishment, issued an opinion declaring it illegal to continue operating the government without a budget.
Both of these things can and should be resurrected. The debt ceiling ought to be abolished, either through Congress or Joe Biden declaring it unconstitutional. Attorney General Merrick Garland ought to return to the previous interpretation of budget laws, and Democrats in Congress should reinforce it as soon as possible. The fewer policy grenades Republicans have in their arsenal, the better.
