Although the spending deal reached yesterday between the White House and House Republicans was unusual in its degrees of partisan malice, it was also rather conventional in this age of elected maliciousness. Vastly unconventional was the manner in which the deal was reached.
The agreement's details are only broadly known, but include caps on discretionary spending for two years, no new taxes, more money for the military and veterans, a cut in IRS appropriations, the reclamation of some unspent funds from a pandemic relief bill, faster environmental reviews of gas and oil drilling projects, and most critically, new work and duration requirements for food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
Those last provisions were a centerpiece of legislation that House Republicans' had already passed, and only their inclusion would permit the debt ceiling's lift. We get the boorishness we voted for, so in that, the compromise agreed to yesterday was only fitting; a product of representative democracy, divided government and — pluralism?
No. Pluralism entails the reasoning together of disparate political factions. It most decidedly does not entail agreements reached while one party holds a knife to the other's throat. That's extortionist terrorism, not pluralism.
And that is what delegitimizes the debt ceiling deal. It will — maybe, for this is the next drama — pass Congress and go on the books as a negotiated compromise. But it was in reality a ransom paid by executive marks to legislative goons and con artists.
President Biden intentionally misspoke when he announced that "the agreement represents a compromise," and The NY Times cooperatively misreported when it wrote that the previous House bill's passage "forced Mr. Biden to do what he had said he never would: negotiate over raising the debt ceiling."
No subject of terrorism is ever forced to parley with the terrorists. It's a choice, and unquestionably the wrong choice. It will, of course, invite more terrorism. Yet to students of political philosophy, most objectionable is that the agreement violates every principle of pluralism, upon which our representative democracy is founded.
The chief goon could not even bring himself to be gracious in victory:
I just got off the phone with the president a bit ago. After he wasted time and refused to negotiate for months, we've come to an agreement in principle that is worthy of the American people.
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) May 28, 2023
I'll deliver a statement at 9:10pm ET. Watch here:https://t.co/vmn31INPH5
And so a second knife was plunged into the president's back. Republicans have scored not only a legislative victory, they have led in the public relations game, daily accusing Biden of intransigence while the White House kept mostly silent.
As for that next drama, who knows? The latest drop-dead date is 5 June, but Republican extortionists are immensely displeased that the poor and disadvantaged among us were not thoroughly screwed in the agreement. Everything "they fought for" in the earlier House bill was omitted, cried Representative and Freedom Caucuser Bob Good of Virginia, and the Times reports that his hateful little club is now "huddling to identify procedural tools to delay passage of the agreement or make the bill more conservative."
Progressive Democrats are also honked — some, seemingly for the wrong reason. Said Lindsay Owens of the liberal Groundwork Collaborative: "Conceding to Republican demands to hamstring the I.R.S.’s ability to go after wealthy tax evaders is a losing proposition for Democrats." It wasn't the idiotic hamstringing of the I.R.S. that was most repugnant; it was the way in which the hamstringing was accomplished.
If passed, the debt ceiling "compromise" will be a black mark on President Biden's legacy. He need not have been victimized; his correct course was to maintain the direction he for so long dictated: no negotiations with a knife at his, ours, and the world's throat. Capitulation not only produced a bad deal, it blew up the very foundation of authentic representative democracy and the American political tradition: pluralism.