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GOP leaders get their just deserts: How the debt limit fight blew up in their faces
Republicans praised Mitch McConnell for taking one for the team -- but he brought this on himself
Nobody expected Senate Republicans would kill a House-passed bill to unconditionally extend the debt limit through 2014 and, as predicted, it overcame a filibuster Wednesday evening with weeks to spare before the deadline.
But for a brief moment, Senate Republicans were overcome by a collective action problem. As a group, they surely didn’t want to vote the debt limit increase down and own the ensuing market panic. But as individuals, none of them wanted their names associated with its passage.
For what seemed like an eternity (but was actually only about 30 minutes) the bill wobbled in limbo on the Senate floor with 58 votes — 55 from Dems, three from Republicans — two shy of the 60 required to break a filibuster and no GOP volunteers forthcoming.
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For three years now, McConnell has characterized every debt limit increase as a favor President Obama has requested of Congress — a normatively bad thing Republicans simply would not agree to without some kind of equally partisan quid pro quo. And every time he’s revealed he was bluffing. In 2011, twice in 2013, and again on Wednesday. It even worked the first time!
But by treating what he knows to be a must-pass measure as a recurring source of leverage for Republicans, he helped foster an expectation among conservative voters that the debt limit wouldn’t be increased without concessions from Democrats. That Republicans would never honor an Obama “request†like this without pocketing something significant in return.
Obama’s recognition of both the bluff and the tell came too late to escape the still-rolling catastrophe of the 2011 debt limit deal, but has since left McConnell and other GOP leaders without a plausible explanation for their mounting defeats. By McConnell’s own standard he’s done Obama’s bidding multiple times now, most recently without pocketing even a pretense of a concession. And as such, it’s hard to take his frustration — and the rest of the Republican establishment’s frustration — with conservative pressure groups gunning for his Senate seat seriously.
Republicans praised Mitch McConnell for taking one for the team -- but he brought this on himself
Nobody expected Senate Republicans would kill a House-passed bill to unconditionally extend the debt limit through 2014 and, as predicted, it overcame a filibuster Wednesday evening with weeks to spare before the deadline.
But for a brief moment, Senate Republicans were overcome by a collective action problem. As a group, they surely didn’t want to vote the debt limit increase down and own the ensuing market panic. But as individuals, none of them wanted their names associated with its passage.
For what seemed like an eternity (but was actually only about 30 minutes) the bill wobbled in limbo on the Senate floor with 58 votes — 55 from Dems, three from Republicans — two shy of the 60 required to break a filibuster and no GOP volunteers forthcoming.
....
For three years now, McConnell has characterized every debt limit increase as a favor President Obama has requested of Congress — a normatively bad thing Republicans simply would not agree to without some kind of equally partisan quid pro quo. And every time he’s revealed he was bluffing. In 2011, twice in 2013, and again on Wednesday. It even worked the first time!
But by treating what he knows to be a must-pass measure as a recurring source of leverage for Republicans, he helped foster an expectation among conservative voters that the debt limit wouldn’t be increased without concessions from Democrats. That Republicans would never honor an Obama “request†like this without pocketing something significant in return.
Obama’s recognition of both the bluff and the tell came too late to escape the still-rolling catastrophe of the 2011 debt limit deal, but has since left McConnell and other GOP leaders without a plausible explanation for their mounting defeats. By McConnell’s own standard he’s done Obama’s bidding multiple times now, most recently without pocketing even a pretense of a concession. And as such, it’s hard to take his frustration — and the rest of the Republican establishment’s frustration — with conservative pressure groups gunning for his Senate seat seriously.
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