Every now and then I enjoy dropping in on the yacht boys of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. It's another, really strange world over there, at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, one so laden with ideological blinkers and mischief, my visitations are irresistible.
The board's most recent anguish, as expressed by its assistant editor, James Freeman, is over President Biden's vow last week that "I will veto everything they send me" — they being the crackpots, cranks and charlatans of the Republican House.
About this impasse, Freeman deploys some snarky condescension. "This Biden promise is sure to be broken once someone explains to the President" — a multidecade creature of the Senate — "that his beloved spending bills ... have to pass both houses of Congress before becoming law."
Freeman neglects to add that both houses of Congress already passed the spending bills, and now the government simply needs to live up to its promised obligations. Freeman, though, feels no need to "explain" this to the Republican House.
Next the assistant editor combines ridicule of a mere rhetorical flourish — "the President has been staking out a position that he can’t possibly maintain, a veto of 'everything'" — with a tawdry touch of argumentum ad populum: "Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is now making an argument that will surely strike many Americans as reasonable."
What strikes Freeman and McCarthy as "reasonable" is the latter's dimwitted threat to catastrophically hold the debt limit where it now stands, thus throwing the U.S. Treasury into default, and the American economy into indescribable ruin. The globe's, too.
Yet Freeman's populist argument, turns out, isn't all that popular. Obviously, "many Americans" agree with House crackpots about forcing a debt default, since "many Americans" are as looney as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yet a mid-January poll showed that 58 percent of voters want the debt ceiling raised, "including 78 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Independents, and 39 percent of Republicans."
But House Republicans prefer pandering to the Gaetzian 61 percent.
I almost wish the House could have its way — and I would definitely wish such a thing if weren't so disastrous for millions of innocents. Go ahead, you militant men and women of the "The People's House," go ahead and refuse a debt ceiling increase; go ahead and let the elderly among the 61 percent watch the cessation of their Social Security checks in July.
Freeman scowls, "the president and his top aides have stressed they have no intention of negotiating on the issue." Heroically — in the editor's pinwheeling eyes — "Mr. McCarthy said Congress should look at paring back expenditures incurred by every federal department."
When Trump blew up annual deficits, House Republicans voted to raise debt ceilings. Now that President Biden has slashed annual deficits, House Republicans oppose such increases. This, too, Freeman neglects.
But he's mighty proud of McCarthy for adding that it's Biden who "is 'playing with the markets' by not agreeing to negotiate."
That one left me speechless.