The Democrats’ Debt Ceiling Goal: Depend On RINOs To Panic

We’ve got some video from Capitol Hill to show you. It’s a colloquy of sorts between House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and the Democrats’ House Minority Whip over the debt limit.

It’s a fairly interesting comparison to see, in that one side is pretty heavy on facts, while the other is awfully keen to use some quite overheated rhetoric.

Not to mention you’ve got one side doing everything they can to disrupt the House’s proceedings and shout down a speaker, while the other side is fairly observant of decorum.

You probably don’t need to watch all eight minutes of this. The first half of it will give you a pretty good taste…

Besides the fact that Katherine Clark is more or less the perfect avatar for the obnoxious Starbucks-swilling bitchy feminist on whom the Democrat Party has staked its political future, your number one takeaway from this ought to be that Clark is flogging that discharge petition.

What’s it for? It’s for the “clean” debt limit bill that Chuck Schumer can’t pass in the Senate because both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema know that if they vote for a debt limit increase with no spending cuts the voters in West Virginia and Arizona will gut them like fish in the 2024 elections.

What Clark is circulating, and needs five Republican traitors to sign, is a “replacement” debt limit bill that just adds another couple of trillion dollars to the national debt load without any reform of spending at all. This is something the American public demonstrably disfavors…

A majority 60% of Americans say spending cuts should accompany a debt ceiling increase, according to a CNN poll.

Additionally, 24% said Congress should raise the debt ceiling “no matter what” while 15% said lawmakers shouldn’t raise it and “allow the U.S. to default on its debts.”

Talks between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and the Biden administration have stalled as Republican negotiators say there is a “significant gap between where we are and where they are.”

“Unless and until the White House recognizes that this is a spending problem, then we’re gonna continue to have a significant gap,” Rep. Garrett Graves, R-La., told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

And this is the Democrats’ problem. They’re in this trouble because they blew up the federal deficit in an irresponsible lame-duck bacchanal last December, passing the idiotically-titled Inflation Reduction Act which added a mountain of spending producing no net benefit to the American people in direct contravention to the public’s wishes.

And now, three quarters of the American people don’t want the debt limit increased unless that spending is rolled back.

The obvious solution here is for Schumer to pass whatever debt limit bill he can and then sort this out in a conference committee with the Dems attempting to preserve as much of the swag passed in December as they can. Stupidly, they’ve done none of this in the expectation that McCarthy would negotiate against himself. That was a bad miscalculation on their part, because McCarthy has held his ground and watched his popularity rise rather than fall.

While Biden and his handlers engaged in another stupid and empty threat that somehow the 14th Amendment could be used to bypass the debt limit as unconstitutional, something no serious legal scholar believes is remotely valid.

So now all they have left is the hope that somehow, five Republican House members will cross the aisle and sign Clark’s discharge petition. When to do so is sure political death for them. The chances of this happening are slim and none.

There’s a great deal of pessimism out there on the Right that elections are compromised, that the public and the culture have gone over to the Left, that America as we know it is finished. Much of that might well be valid. But what is also true is that the people who run the Democrat Party, especially on Capitol Hill, are not that smart. They’re very unimpressive political minds who come from places where Republicans can’t get elected and so they have no real idea how to win competitive races or engage with the public across a wide swath of ideological diversity.

In short, they’re a bunch of machine hacks.

They just assumed House Republicans would cave. That’s not an altogether unreasonable assumption given the history. But previous Republican surrenders were never unconditional as Team Biden has demanded. There was always some compromise given, some face-saving golden bridge to retreat across.

This? Demanding that five Republican House members commit political suicide and do something Chuck Schumer can’t summon the 51 Democrat senators to do? This is desperation without a plan.

What’s most instructive here is the lack of panic on the part of the Democrats at the idea they’re losing by a 60-24 margin in a CNN poll on an issue they’ve messaged in the most predatory way they could for three months. This is beginning to look like a Waterloo of sorts assuming there aren’t five suicidal Republicans willing to throw their careers away to save Schumer and Biden.