Heather Cox Richardson writes about Biden’s deliberately low-key description of the deal he made with Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy is on television, Biden is not. McCarthy claims victory, Biden is quiet. What gives? (Interesting comment at the end of the post: Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her has moved to Russia “for her safety.”)
She writes:
“[O]ne of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’” President Joe Biden said to reporters yesterday afternoon before leaving the White House on the Marine One helicopter. “Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
Biden’s unusually revealing comment about the budget negotiations was actually a statement about his presidency. Unlike his Republican opponents, he has refused to try to win points by playing the media and instead has worked behind the scenes to govern, sometimes staying out of negotiations, sometimes being central to them.
The result has been, as Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf summarized today, historic. Biden has worked to replace 40 years of supply-side economics with policies to rebuild the nation’s economy and infrastructure by supporting ordinary Americans. The American Rescue Plan gave the United States a faster economic recovery from the COVID pandemic than any other major economy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has already funded more than 32,000 projects in more than 4,500 communities in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories.
The Inflation Reduction Act made the biggest investment in addressing climate change in our history, and according to University of Washington transportation analyst Jack Conness, it and the CHIPS and Science Act have already attracted over $220 billion in private investment, much of it going to Republican-dominated states: Tennessee, Nevada, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have each attracted more than $4 billion; Ohio, more than $6 billion; Arizona, more than $7 billion; South Carolina, more than $9 billion; and Georgia, more than $13 billion.
Victoria Guida in Politico yesterday reported that the reordering of the economy under Biden and the Democrats has reversed the widening income gap between wage workers and upper-income professionals that has been growing for the past 40 years. The pay of those making an average of $12.50 an hour grew by almost 6% from 2020 to 2022, even after inflation.
Those gains are now at risk as pandemic measures end and the Fed raises interest rates to bring down inflation, although the wage increases are only a piece of the inflation puzzle: Talmon Joseph Smith and Joe Rennison of the New York Times today reported that companies raising their prices to “protect…profits” are “adding to inflation.” In other words, companies pushed prices beyond normal profit margins during the pandemic and the economic recovery, then maintained those higher profit margins with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and continue to maintain them now.
The fight over the debt ceiling is both an example of the different approaches to negotiation on the part of Biden and Republicans like House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and part of the larger question about the direction of the country.
On January 13, 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned McCarthy that the Treasury was about to hit the borrowing limit established by Congress and that she would have to resort to extraordinary measures in order to meet obligations until Congress raised the debt ceiling.
On March 9, as part of the usual budget process, Biden produced a detailed budget, which was a wish list of programs that would continue to build the country from the bottom up. He told McCarthy he would meet with the speaker as soon as he produced his own budget, which McCarthy could not do because the far-right House Freedom Caucus (these days being abbreviated as HFC) wanted extreme cuts to which other Republicans would never agree.
On April 26 the House Republicans passed a bill that would require $4.8 trillion in cuts but was quite vague about how it would do so apart from getting rid of much of the legislation the Democrats had just passed. HFC members said they would not raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passed their bill. That is, they would drive the United States into default, crashing the U.S. and the global economy, until the president and the Democrats agreed to their policies. Even then, they would raise it only until next spring, with the expectation that it would then become a key factor in the 2024 election.
Biden insisted all along that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, which pays for money already appropriated under the normal process of Congress and which Congress raised three times under former president Trump even as he added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. Biden said he would happily negotiate over the budget. McCarthy, meanwhile, was out in front of the cameras and on social media insulting Biden and insisting that it was Biden’s fault that talks took so long to get started.
Late Saturday, the two sides announced an agreement “in principle” to raise the debt ceiling for two years—clearing the presidential election. As the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted, it protects current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; keeps tax rates as they are; increases spending on defense and veterans’ programs; leaves most other domestic spending the same; cuts a little from the expanded funding of the Internal Revenue Service; and tweaks both the permitting process for energy projects and the existing work requirements in the food assistance program.
As Rampell points out, “this much-ballyhooed ‘deal’ doesn’t seem terribly different from whatever budget agreement would have materialized anyway later this year, during the usual annual appropriations process, under divided government. To President Biden’s credit, the most objectionable ransoms that Republicans had been demanding are all gone.”
Now the measure has to get through both parties, with congressmembers back in Washington today after the holiday weekend. Freedom Caucus members are howling at the deal. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) is threatening to bottle the measure up in the House Rules Committee, which decides what bills make it to the floor. The Freedom Caucus forced McCarthy to stack that committee with far-right extremists as part of his deal for the speakership (it has nine Republicans but only four Democrats on it). But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s alliance with Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) might pay off here, since the two have thrown their weight behind the measure.
Even if the measure does pass before the June 5 deadline when the Treasury runs out of money, it has had an important effect. As Rampell noted, it has weakened the United States. It has enabled both China and Russia to portray the U.S. as unstable and an unreliable partner. As if to prove that criticism, Biden had to cancel a trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea, where he was strengthening the Indo-Pacific alliances designed to weaken Chinese dominance of the region. (And Russia continues to involve itself in U.S. politics: today Tara Reade, the woman who in 2020 accused Biden of sexually assaulting her, appeared on Russian television next to alleged spy Maria Butina to say she has fled to Russia out of fear for her life in the U.S.)
Writing in Foreign Policy, Howard W. French sees a more sweeping problem with the debt ceiling fight: it “highlights America’s warped priorities.” “[W]hen a rich and powerful country finds it easier to cut back on the way that it invests in its people, in education, in science, and in making sure that the weakest among them are not completely left behind than to curtail useless and profligate weapons spending,” he said, “there are reasons to worry about the foundations of its power.”
—
Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/build/
https://www.jackconness.com/ira-chips-investments
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/29/low-income-wages-employment-00097135
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1188
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1454
https://rollcall.com/2023/04/26/house-passes-1-5-trillion-debt-limit-increase-spending-cuts/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/28/debt-limit-deal-budget-differences/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/freak-cavalcade-but-not-more
Diane Ravitch's blog 
LOL re: Tara Reade. Quite an endgame there.
LikeLike
In 2016, Russian intelligence, at the behest of Vladimir Putin, expended enormous resources to get the moronovirius and sexual predator Donald Trump elected President of the United States. One of our political parties still has not grasped the singular strangeness and dire significance of the fact that the Russian intelligence services spent billions to get this guy elected.
In 2018, an American lawyer and former aide to Senator Biden, Tara Reade, penned an article in Medium which can only be described as a love letter to Putin. In this, she says that “everything you learned about Russia” is “wrong”; that “Our American empire is falling and failing”; that “Putin scares the power elite in America because he is a compassionate, caring, visionary leader” “beloved by Russia” and “keeping a calm focus on his own country’s development and future.”
Reade is, of course, the person who made the sexual assault charge against Biden. And at about the same time, she deleted the Medium article(though it was available via the Wayback Machine, which archives old web pages).
Wonder if Trump will be joining her.
LikeLike
cx: that can only be described
LikeLike
All Republican members of the HFC should be added to the domestic terrorist watch list.
LikeLike
As a long time student of the Presidency–and a history teacher–I agree Biden has had some significant successes. But this deal–however necessary–is not a great deal for ordinary Americans. Progressives are balking at it. The media will continue to play to controversy and the “trouble-makers” such as Trump, DeSantis, and McCarthy. Biden could benefit–as could have President Obama–by asking for media time and talking directly to American voters. aka “Fireside chats.” There are many of us–who voted for him and likely will again–who are concerned about the continued build-up of the military, as shown by the increases in this budget deal. Unless the Ukraine war can wind down, I fear Biden will lose a lot of progressives and anti-war types. They won’t vote Republican, but they probably won’t work for Biden’s re-election. Democrats lose when they continue war policies (i.e. LBJ dropping out & Humphrey losing) or don’t engage the left flank. This factor was at play in both of Hillary’s defeats, first by Obama in the primaries, then later by Trump in the general election of ’16.
LikeLike
Biden was not my choice for the Democratic nomination for the 202o presidential race. Throughout his career, he reliably supported the interests of the bankers headquartered in that corporate tax haven, his home state of Delaware, above those of ordinary people. He carries water for the racketeers who run the U.S. healthcare industry and has long been one of the major opponents of Medicare for All. He behaved appallingly in the Anita Hill hearings. He wrote the idiotic bill that made MDMA a Schedule 1 substance based upon research that has become a classic of bad science (the researchers had accidentally worked with methamphetamine instead of MDMA–the whole sad story of this fiasco can be found in Barry Glassner’s excellent book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. But Biden has been a better president than I expected him to be, and the major alterantives to him right now, Jabba the Trump and DeFascist, are both unthinkable.
LikeLike
Agreed. Of course, they could run the speaker, Joe McCarthy…or is it Charlie McCarthy?
LikeLiked by 1 person
lol
LikeLike
If Joe McCarthy and Charlie McCarthy had a baby, . . .
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well said, Bob. I think that due to Biden’s age and his sense of motrtality, he’s striving to rise above his past errors and make his mark as a latter-day FDR. FDR had large majorities in both houses. Biden works with a tiny majority in the Senate that he could lose if Manchin or Sinema get annoyed, and a House led by insane people like Greene and Boebert and Gosar.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brilliant, Diane.
LikeLike
I just finished watching the three part History channel series on FDR. I am really a neophyte when it comes to politics. FDR was a master in how he got around a public that was worn out after a costly world war only 15 years past and rabidly antiwar and in no small measure antisemitic. Like every American of my age, we all studied WWII; our parents fought (and died) in it. That history didn’t really get into the personalities and their different perspectives and the intense job of forming a coalition/ united front in the face of those differences. I won’t compare Biden to FDR, but I do see a similar ability in his ability to forge bridges where the odds of success looked poor. I have a much greater appreciation for skilled politicians who can put ego aside and work for the good of the country as a whole even though progress may seem glacially slow at times. I know there has been tremendous progress in my lifetime. Let’s hope we can build on it.
LikeLike
I can’t remember a time when the divisions in our society were so toxic. The passage of a bipartisan bill is a good sign that people of both parties can work together.
LikeLike
Somewhere in the Iles there’s a Carthy turning over in his grave at what his clan has come to.
LikeLike
Wonder why its so toxic??? The media maybe??????? Black vs white, vaccinated vs unvaxxed, going after cops. How delusional are you guys about Biden like seriously? The same guy who has been lying for 50 years. Who has said most racist things ever such as “want your kids to grow up min a racial jungle” The same guy who ahs taken 10 million plus in bribes with his son to Ukraine and China. You people are sick.
LikeLike