McConnell’s Deal

Yesterday Ezra Klein explained Mitch McConnell’s surprising proposal to empower Barack Obama. "The process McConnell is proposing would go like this: First, Obama would submit a request for a $700 billion increase in the debt ceiling, along with a nonbinding proposal to cut spending. That would automatically trigger a $100 billion increase in the debt ceiling to give Congress time to consider the request. Congress could then vote to either approve or disapprove of the president’s request. If they disapprove of it, however, Obama could veto their disapproval, and unless two-thirds of both chambers voted to overturn his veto — a virtually unthinkable outcome given that Democrats control the Senate — he could raise the debt ceiling anyway.

The same thing would happen, albeit in $900 billion increments rather than $700 billion increments, in fall 2011 and summer 2012. Take it all together, and Republicans would almost completely forfeit their leverage over the debt ceiling. In return, they’d get to make Democrats vote repeatedly to first raise the debt ceiling and then to “approve” of raising the debt ceiling. As Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said, this “gives the president 100 percent of the responsibility.”

Or, to put it differently, 100 percent of the blame. Raising the debt ceiling is unpopular. That’s part of why House Republicans are demanding such massive concessions in return for doing it. But McConnell, who leads the Senate minority and wants to lead the Senate majority in 2013, would not have to vote for any increases in the debt ceiling, nor would his members. That’s why this appeals to him: It would force Senate Democrats to repeatedly vote to raise the debt ceiling, and he hopes that would make it easier to defeat them in the next election. As David Corn described it, the message to the president is: “You drive. We’ll carp.”"

While other Republican leaders predictably balked at the idea he followed up with In praise of McConnell’s plan. "If you want to take a generous view of McConnell’s motivations here, you’d say that the canny Kentuckian, whose understanding of the way polarization and party discipline dominate today’s congress vastly exceeds that of any other politician, realized that it was no longer safe to assume that the two parties would always reach agreement in time to lift the debt ceiling, and in that world, the debt ceiling was too dangerous to the American economy.

The cynical interpretation of McConnell’s motivations is that McConnell sees that the White House is winning the politics of this issue, and he knows that Republicans will eventually be forced to agree to something. When they do, President Obama will be the great Compromiser-in-Chief. He’ll have shown himself willing to face down his party to make a deal and he’ll get credit for making it impossible for Republicans to continue to say no. After three years during which McConnell had slowly but surely destroyed Obama’s reputation as a postpartisan unifier, the White House will see its core political brand revived and invigorated. Obama will be a lock for reelection."

Kevin Drum was less insightful but more entertaining. It's Now Official: The GOP is a Party of Sixth Graders. "WTF? This is possibly the most juvenile, most buck passing, most transparently mendacious proposal I can recall from any party leader in recent memory. The bright idea here is to force Democrats to repeatedly vote to raise the debt ceiling during campaign season, and to repeatedly force Obama to lay out enormous budget cuts that have no purpose except to piss off interest groups. The whole thing is so patently, ridiculously political that it's breathtaking. It ought to be named the "Gratuitous Embarrassment of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party Act of 2011."

Does McConnell really think that he's being clever here? That his purpose isn't plain to everyone? The Republican Party has now passed from Alice in Wonderland to Lord of the Flies. It's like dealing with a bunch of kids on a playground. Are McConnell and Boehner trying to prove Obama's point that he's the only adult at the table right now?"

He followed up, Class Warfare Boomerangs on the GOP. "But I suppose there's a bigger picture here than just McConnell's cynicism. And the bigger picture, obviously, is that McConnell wouldn't have proposed giving Obama his debt ceiling increase with only political strings attached unless he was convinced that Republicans were losing the PR battle for a more comprehensive deal. And since the only real stumbling block to a comprehensive deal was Obama's insistence on revenue increases, McConnell must have felt that they were losing the PR battle even there. After years of owning the tax issue, this must have come as something of a tectonic shock.

Which is.....interesting. Obviously, Obama has been positioning himself all along as the reasonable, centrist guy, willing to agree to trillions in spending cuts as long as Republicans are willing to close a few modest tax loopholes. Last week Republicans derided Obama's repeated focus on tax breaks for corporate jets as class warfare etc., but you know what? It must have been working. Somewhere down in the bowels of the GOP's polling operation, they must have discovered that the public was buying Obama's pitch that "the wealthy need to pitch in too.""

Klein followed up today Snatching press releases from the jaws of policy concessions. "The split, in other words, pits the Republican establishment against the conservative base, and the establishment's record in such match-ups hasn't been so good over the last two years. My guess, meanwhile, is the White House will line up with the conservatives on this one, because for both substantive and political reasons, they really want a deficit deal, and see this as more evidence that this debate is going well for them and poorly for the Republicans."

He goes on to say, if the plan becomes the norm, it's the end of the debt ceiling as a political issue. "That's a big step in the wrong direction if you think we should give congressional minorities a semi-regular opportunity to hold the economy hostage in return for major policy concessions. But it's a step in the right direction if you believe that such high-stakes hostage opportunities are an insane and dangerous way for our political system to operate and that, in the long run, the country would be better off minimizing the harm that partisanship and gridlock could do to our economy rather than maximizing it. I'm mostly in that latter camp, but if the rest of the political system was there with me, we wouldn't be embroiled in this debt-ceiling debate at all."

Kevin Drum asks Has Wall Street Given Up on Boehner?. He got a message saying, "[Some very conservative investment bankers] said it was common knowledge that McConnell was taking very serious back-channel heat from Wall Street because the conclusion was that there was no reliable leadership in the House with Boehner unable to control his caucus and Cantor making his leadership play now. They view Boehner as out. In other words, McConnell is Wall Street's only viable player and so he is taking all the calls. And those calls are not saying to insist upon cuts only come hell or high water. They are saying raise the F-Ing ceiling NOW."

Drum said: "This sounds sort of plausible to me, but your mileage may vary. In any case, the final paragraph of this email amused me because I noticed the same thing yesterday, and it's a testament to the efficiency of the conservative messaging machine. Literally within a few hours, I swear that every single conservative politician and pundit had adopted the line that talks had broken down because it was just impossible to negotiate with a socialist thug who was obviously dealing in bad faith. (The "bad faith" in question, of course, was Obama's continuing insistence that modest revenue increases be part of any deal.) The speed with which this talking point made the rounds was truly impressive."