What Would a Debt Ceiling Deal Look Like? Plus notes on Feinstein and more.
My weekly political roundup.
What would a deal (or deals) that raised the debt ceiling and kept the government open look like?
It seems clear what Democrats must concede: some form of spending reduction. It could be cuts or caps on domestic discretionary spending, maybe it will be a commission to explore changes to the entitlement programs, or it might take another form. But it seems unlikely that Republicans would accept any deal that doesn’t cut spending overall in some way.
Energy permitting reform seems like another component that Republicans want and Democrats are willing to deal on. Extensions of some tax credits Republicans like may also be something for Democrats to trade.
Republicans are demanding new work requirements, but they would be anathema to Democrats’ base. Similarly, President Biden isn’t agreeing to get rid of his student loan relief program (though that may be moot in a month, because the Supreme Court seems likely to rule that Biden didn’t have the power to enact it) or repeal elements of his signature Inflation Reduction Act.
But there are clear areas where one could imagine Democrats making concessions that they could swallow — while insisting on protecting the programs they value most.
The trickier part of the equation is what would Republicans be willing to give up? Make no mistake, if President Biden and Senate Democrats agree to a deal that doesn’t have provisions that they can sell as wins to their base, they’re going to have a political problem.
Yet, most things Democrats want, Republicans strenuously oppose. That goes for non-monetary things like gun control, abortion rights, and voting rights. It also goes for increased taxes or closed loopholes for the wealthy. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), one of the few Democrats who holds a district that Donald Trump won in 2020, is pushing his party to demand such increases, seeing them as both a popular populist measure and a way to reduce inflation.
But while Republicans might conceivably deal on something like closing the carried interest loophole, it seems inconceivable that they’d totally jettison the anti-tax ethos that has guided GOP economic orthodoxy for 40 years. Such a move would infuriate groups on the right like the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform (purveyors of the famous anti-tax pledge that most Republicans in Congress have signed).
So if not increased taxes on the wealthy, or some non-monetary policy that Republicans could concede without raising spending, what options are there?
Perhaps some sort of immigration deal that pairs much stricter border enforcement with legalized status for “Dreamers” — the young Americans brought to the country as little children. An overwhelming percentage of the public supports such a deal and given that the fight to protect Dreamers is decades old, it would be a solid win for Democrats. The possibility for such a deal is murky, given that Republicans want an enforcement only bill, and their hardliners might balk at such a concession. Yet, it’s something that Republicans could at least conceivably swallow more easily than some other potential things on the Democratic wishlist.
Another possibility would be including some sort of paid leave deal — probably something agreed upon by the bipartisan Bice-Houlahan working group in the House. Again, paid leave is enormously popular across the board with Americans (while I’m linking to a partisan poll because it’s more recent, I see several non-partisan polls that found the same thing in years past).
The trickier part is how to pay for it?
The most conceivable method would be cobbling together a bunch of populist provisions like closing the carried interest loophole (which would produce $14 billion), or increasing the new tax on stock buybacks by another percent or two. The catch is whether they’d come close to producing a substantial enough program for it to be a win for Democrats? If so, it seems not impossible, albeit maybe unlikely, that Republicans could embrace such a program as a sign of their newfound populism. If not, however, it becomes harder to see how such a new program could be part of a deal.
Overall, these seem like areas where Republicans could potentially concede something — since many of them, at least privately, want to act in these areas anyway and a lot of their voters may not be inextricably opposed to such action (in fact they might even support it).
Whatever the answer is, this will be the question of the summer and probably fall. There is no planet on which Democrats are going to make significant concessions of any sort without getting something back. Similarly, divided government means they can’t just ignore Republican demands like they did in the last Congress. Both sides are going to have to give or the debt ceiling will get breached and the government will get shut down — possibly for a significant period of time…
Feinstein is not the victim of sexism
Allies of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ailing 89 year old California Democrat who has been absent for two months due to a case of shingles, have charged that calls for her resignation reflect a sexist double standard.
But that claim is categorically false.
It is true that Senators like Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) missed significantly more time recovering from serious ailments. But in most of those cases, the senators in question were much younger — Kirk was 52 and Johnson was 59. In Johnson’s case, there was also an extenuating circumstance that had zero to do with his gender: had he resigned, a Republican governor would have replaced him with a Republican, which would have flipped control of the Senate to the GOP.
By contrast, Feinstein is retiring at the end of the term and there have already been questions about her capacity to do the job.
Feinstein backers have also pointed to elderly male senators who became infirm late in legendary tenures in the chamber like Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, John McCain, and Strom Thurmond, and argued that they didn’t face such calls to resign.
But the history reveals a far murkier picture.
In 2001, with the Senate evenly divided, the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “A Hushed but Vital Issue: Thurmond's Health,” which detailed Republican worries about the impact of the senator’s declining health. A Washington Post story that October observed that Thurmond’s Chief of Staff, Robert “Duke” Short had become, “South Carolina's de facto senior senator,” while also addressing Thurmond’s five hospitalizations over an 11-month span in 2000 and 2001. It quoted senators acknowledging Thurmond’s declining health, including one Democrat who noted, “he's obviously barely there…If you talk to him about one subject, he's likely to talk to you about another. He fades in and out.”
While there weren’t calls for Thurmond’s resignation, once again, politics explained why: mirroring the Johnson case, South Carolina had a Democratic governor, who would have appointed a Democrat, thereby flipping control of the Senate until May 2001, when Sen Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) left the Republican Party and began caucusing with Democrats. Even after that, it would have extended Democrats’ razor thin majority by another vote.
Speculation and reporting about the fitness and absences of an aging, ailing senator weren’t unique to Thurmond. Here is a Politico story from 2009, headlined “Legislation in limbo with absences,” which included grousing and worrying about the impact of absences by Byrd and Kennedy similar to what we’ve heard during Feinstein’s lengthy absence. In that case, Democrats had many more votes to spare, and only needed Byrd and Kennedy when they had purely partisan legislation that necessitated all 60 of their members to vote.
And there was a crucial difference at play as well: while Byrd missed more than 40 percent of roll call votes that year, when Democrats truly needed his vote to pass health care reform (Kennedy had passed away by that point), he was able to be present. There is zero indication that Feinstein could return to Washington to vote if Democrats needed her vote.
In so much as there wasn’t grousing about absences by these senators, it solely stemmed from the fact that they didn’t have a major impact on the ability of their party to achieve its goals — or the Senate to function. They might have delayed votes on occasion, but after each absence, the senator in question came back (for the last 18+ months of his time in the Senate, Thurmond was in the minority, so his vote was less essential).
In the case of Feinstein, much of the anger and the demands for her resignation stem from her unwillingness to provide any clue as to when she might return to the Senate. Her absence also comes at a crucial moment, when Democrats have only a 51-49 majority, and Sen. Joe Manchin, who is up for reelection in overwhelmingly Republican West Virginia in 2024, spends most of his time voting with Republicans. That makes Feinstein’s vote essential even to confirm some nominees.
Additionally, her absence has left the Judiciary Committee deadlocked, which prevents it from advancing nominees with no Republican support. This is a stark contrast to the 2009 cases, because the much larger Democratic majority at the time meant much larger committee margins.
Overall, Feinstein’s absence is raising similar questions to those tied to illnesses and absences by male senators in the past. Because of different political circumstances, these questions have fueled discussion of whether she should resign. Anyone who claims that she’s the victim of a sexist double standard is just flat wrong…
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