If reports of the debt ceiling talks are accurate, then Kevin McCarthy's final demand should be a re-extension of federal unemployment benefits. He may need them himself, because the House's Matt Gaetzes will be out for his hide.
After all of the House speaker's calls for suicidal charges of his lightheaded Freedom Caucus brigade, the deal in the works looks more like a feint. It would raise the debt ceiling for two years, after which the apocalyptic game would resume, but critically, well beyond the 2024 election.
Military and veterans-care spending would increase, while nondefense discretionary spending would, for two years, remain pretty much where it is now. Inflation would mean an effective cut in domestic programs, although the White House would redirect about $10 billion slashed from the IRS's budget back to those programs.
The Biden administration contends that "those shifts would functionally make nondefense discretionary spending the same next year as it was this year," reports the Times. And that is where Speaker McCarthy's severe indigestion would begin.
Such a deal would satisfy all but the right and left's hardcore ideological factions. But while President Biden's job depends not on the left's contentment, at least for the next 18 months, McCarthy's speakership is wholly reliant on the good graces of roughly three dozen lunatics in the Freedom Caucus.
"Liberal groups were already complaining on Thursday about the reported deal to reduce the I.R.S. funding increase," continues the Times, and "the cuts contained in the package were all but certain to be too modest to win the votes of hard-line fiscal conservatives in the House."
With amusing understatement, McCarthy acknowledged, "I don’t think everybody is going to be happy at the end of the day." I seem to recall Louis XVI saying something similar about his view of the French Revolution.
Indeed, Texas Rep. Chip Roy is preparing McCarthy's trundle. "Someone explain to me why that’s an off-ramp that should be taken now," he told reporters. "I think it’s an exit ramp about five exits too early." Said Rep. Bob Good, "That would absolutely collapse the Republican majority for this debt ceiling increase." Added Congressman Ralph Norman, "What I’ve seen now is not good."
All three of these House members are Freedom Caucusers, and any one of them can call for McCarthy's head.