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Preparing for Republican Debt Blackmail
Nobody knows for sure what will happen in the midterm elections. But if Republicans take one or both houses of Congress, the most important question will be one that is getting hardly any public attention: What will the Biden administration do when the G.O.P. threatens to blow up the world economy by refusing to raise the debt limit?In particular, will Democrats be prepared to take the extraordinary actions the situation will demand, doing whatever it takes to avoid being blackmailed?Notice that I said “when,” not “if.” After Republicans took the House in 2010, they quickly weaponized the debt limit against the Obama administration, using it to extract spending cuts they couldn’t have achieved through normal legislative means. And that was a pre-MAGA G.O.P., one that for the most part didn’t deny the legitimacy of the president and didn’t make excuses for violent insurrections.In fact, I wonder whether Republicans will even seriously try to extract concessions this time around, as opposed to creating chaos for its own sake.Notice also that I said “blow up the world economy,” not merely hamstring the U.S. government. For the consequences of forcing a federal debt default, which is what refusing to raise the limit would do, would extend far beyond the operations of the federal government itself.Let’s back up and talk about why any of this is an issue. U.S. law, for historical reasons, requires in effect that Congress vote on the budget twice. First, senators and representatives enact legislation that sets tax rates and authorizes spending. This legislation ends up determining the federal budget balance. But if we end up running a deficit, Congress must vote a second time, to authorize borrowing to cover that deficit.It’s not clear that this procedure ever made sense. In any case, in modern times the debt limit empowers cowardly posturing: Politicians can claim to be for fiscal responsibility, refusing to vote for a higher debt limit, without specifying how the budget should be balanced.And no, “we should eliminate wasteful spending” isn’t an honest answer. The federal government is basically a giant insurance company with an army: Spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military, and voters want to maintain all of these programs. There’s surely waste in the government, as there is in any large organization, but even if we could somehow make that waste disappear, it wouldn’t do much to reduce the deficit.Someone seriously worried about the deficit could call for higher taxes. After all, the U.S. tax burden is low compared with other wealthy countries. But Republicans aren’t going to go there.Where will they go? There’s lots of evidence that Republicans will, if they can, try to use the debt limit to extort major cuts in Social Security and Medicare. They probably couldn’t pass such cuts — which would be deeply unpopular — through the normal legislative process, and they certainly wouldn’t have enough votes to override a Biden veto. But the idea would be to force Democrats into complicity, so that the public doesn’t realize who’s responsible for the pain.And that’s a best-case scenario. As I said, the G.O.P. is far more radical now than it was more than a decade ago, and it might well be less interested in achieving policy goals than in blowing up the world economy on a Democratic president’s watch.Why would refusing to raise the debt limit blow up the economy? In the modern world, U.S. debt plays a crucial role: It is the ultimate safe asset, easily converted into cash, and there are no good alternatives. If investors lose confidence that the U.S. government will honor its obligations, the resulting financial storm will make the recent chaos in Britain look like a passing shower.So what should be done to avert this threat? If Republicans do gain control of one or both houses in November, Democrats should use the lame-duck session to enact a very large rise in the debt limit, enough to put the issue on ice for years. Republicans and pundits who don’t understand the stakes would furiously attack this move, but it would be far better than enabling extortion — and would probably be forgotten by the time of the 2024 election.If for some reason Democrats don’t take this obvious step, the Biden administration should be prepared to turn to legal strategies for bypassing the debt limit. There appear to be several loopholes the administration could exploit — minting trillion-dollar platinum coins is the most famous, but there are others, like issuing bonds with no maturity date and hence no face value.The Obama administration was unwilling to go any of these routes, largely, I think, because it believed that they would look gimmicky and undignified, and it preferred to seek compromise. But surely Democrats don’t need to worry about dignity when the other party is ruled by Donald Trump. And in any case, they’re now confronting opponents who aren’t just radical but also anti-democracy; no real compromise is possible.Of course, none of this will be relevant if Democrats hold Congress. But they should prepare for the worst.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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Donald Trump and the Peril to Democracy
More from our inbox:$30 TrillionWhen We Wrote It by HandOver the weekend, Donald Trump dangled, for the first time, that he could issue pardons to anyone facing charges for participating in the Jan. 6 attack if he is elected president again.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Sought Ways to Seize Vote Machines” (front page, Feb. 1):New accounts that show that former President Donald Trump was directly involved in plans to use security agencies, including the military, to seize control of voting machines in swing states some six weeks after Election Day confirm how perilously close the nation came to a burgeoning autocracy.Were it not for some of Mr. Trump’s trusted advisers, including the clownish, conspiracy-theory-peddling Rudy Giuliani, Americans might have witnessed armed military personnel rolling into their communities, crushing democracy along the way.That Rudy Giuliani might have been a voice of reason during this moment is in itself a weird and chilling commentary on just how fragile our electoral system is.Cody LyonBrooklynTo the Editor:Re “Trump Suggests He May Pardon Jan. 6 Rioters if He Has Another Term” (news article, Jan. 31):“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.” So spoke Donald Trump at a recent rally.Mr. Trump’s strategy to prevent his indictment is to threaten riots. Indeed, with many millions of cultlike true believers, his indictment surely would cause mass civil unrest and perhaps civil war, especially given that many of his most ardent supporters are well armed.And one might well ask: Which side would the police and members or ex-members of the military be on? Many of them are ardent Trumpists. Would any prosecutor be willing to risk this?Mr. Trump’s strategy is clear, and those of us who want to rescue our country from this would-be autocrat need a clear strategy, too. And that, unfortunately, cannot include the liberal fantasy of Mr. Trump in the dock or jail. Trump and Trumpism must be defeated at the ballot box. It’s the only way.Gerald Lee VogelGermantown, Md.To the Editor:If Donald Trump runs for re-election as president, it would take me a ream of printer paper and 8-point type to list the reasons for not voting for him. And I am a registered Republican.But now a new reason has arisen that takes its place at the top of the list. On Saturday, at a rally in Texas, Mr. Trump said that if he is re-elected as president, he would consider pardoning those prosecuted for what they did at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Somehow Mr. Trump feels that the people being charged with crimes are being treated unfairly.I was at home on Jan. 6 and spent most of the day watching news coverage. It took our former president almost three hours to ask the crowd to disperse and go home, telling them, “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” Several of his aides, including his daughter Ivanka, as well as legislators and conservative media reporters, begged him earlier to ask the rioters to disperse and go home. That did no good.It boggles my mind that anyone who watched even part of what happened on Jan. 6 and saw Mr. Trump’s reaction to it could in any way support or vote for him. I certainly cannot. Mr. Trump may have thought the people who overtook the Capitol deserved our love and were very special. I did not.Gerald S. TanenbaumCharleston, S.C.To the Editor:Re “Trump’s Aim: Keep Power at All Costs,” by Shane Goldmacher (news analysis, front page, Feb. 2):The prospect of Donald Trump’s bid for another term as president has the media in a tizzy. The same media that allowed Mr. Trump to control the narrative during the 2016 presidential campaign may be overcompensating for its past failures by sounding the alarm bell with headlines predicting the demise of freedom as we know it. With Mr. Trump’s unfitness for office well documented and his waning ability to use the media as a conduit to deceit, why such angst?Have you forgotten how soundly Mr. Trump was defeated just 15 months ago? President Biden received the most votes ever cast for a U.S. presidential candidate and won by a margin of more than seven million votes.The media can rest assured in the knowledge that the electorate is democracy’s safe harbor.Jane LarkinTampa, Fla.$30 TrillionThe Treasury Department in Washington.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “National Debt Breaks Record at $30 Trillion” (front page, Feb. 2):Well, the national debt wouldn’t be so high if big money — corporations and individuals — were paying its fair share of taxes.Eva ZuckerNew YorkWhen We Wrote It by Hand The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Case for Writing Longhand” (Inside The Times, Jan. 21):As a retired teacher, I found that your article brought back many memories. I am from the time when the nuns converted left-handers like me into writing right-handed by some encouragement and some strapping.Most of the first two decades of my teaching career, the 1980s and ’90s, saw all of the student work handwritten and most of my notes and tests handwritten and then copied; I loved the smell of a mimeograph machine early in the morning.The next two decades saw the increase in typing and the decrease in handwriting skills, including my own. There was a time when many people were illiterate, but now they are illegible.Many students were surprised to know that if examiners couldn’t read your answers they couldn’t give them marks, and they wouldn’t spend time trying to translate the scribbles into words.It’s time to bring back pen “licenses” that confirm that young children can write neatly enough to now use a pen, and make sure the kids deserve them.Dennis FitzgeraldMelbourne, Australia More
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The First Post-Reagan Presidency
Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More
