The White House is now shamelessly hawking the debt-ceiling shakedown bill by saying “it could have been a lot worse.”
Had Biden done his job, it could have been avoided altogether.
It’s uncanny: Biden seems to be channeling Obama, rather than forging a new path.
Soon we’ll hear the White House bleating: “Biden is helpless. He’s only the president.”
The hard truth that a lot of liberals are going to have to finally accept is that Obama’s capitulations to right-wing extremists led the country into the catastrophic clutches of Trump.
God only knows where Biden’s capitulations are taking us.
We knew he would. The reason we knew he would is because he wanted to. The Chamber of Commerce said no 14th Amendment and so he didn’t invoke it. These are the people he listens to. A neoliberal cannot change his spots–not in the clinches.
This is at least the second time that Biden has betrayed Pramilla Jayapal and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Rep. Jayapal needs to tell the president that the CPC will not support him for reelection unless this bill is changed.
Remember: Biden did everything he could to shut the Democrats out of the sausage-making. Then he made sure that the Republicans received legislative text an entire day before the Democrats. In order to survive as a political party, the Dems must now expel a turncoat.
We can look forward now to the awful spectacle of Biden telling us that a spending freeze is not a spending cut.
The cuts will land most ruinously on people of color and the young–the two constituencies that put him over the finish line in 2020.
Way to go, bud.
Biden s is trying to throw away his presidency and is sacrificing a second term. We need a president who will stand firm against Republican extremism. Gavin Newscom? Josh Shapiro? The debt-ceiling fiasco makes it official: the Dems have to cut Biden loose. Perhaps, after all, this is really his subconscious attempt to let everyone know he really doesn’t want a second term.
And when Hakkim Jeffries tries to sell this steaming pile of offal to his caucus, they should boo him out of the room. Biden’s refusal to allow Democratic Congressional leaders any direct participation in the shakedown “negotiations” was a giant Fuck You to the party, anyway.
Progressive Dems did everything they could to save Biden from himself. Sen. Merkey said that they would have his back if he invoked the 14th Amendment. Still, Biden chose this path instead.
Didn’t Nancy Peloisi reportedly say that about the Obama team, before saying she never said what she said?
To the point: Who allowed Biden to walk into this trap?
Robert Reich identifies the missteps:
“I admire Joe Biden but he should not have allowed the media to so badly mischaracterize what’s happening. He never should have begun negotiating with McCarthy. Biden has the bully pulpit; he should have addressed the nation by now, pointing out that this fight is manufactured entirely by House Republicans.”
Establishment Dems are still living in a dream world where the Republicans have patriotism and ethics and Mitch McConnell is “a man of honor.”
Progressive Dems know better.
Unlike Trump and DeSantis, she didn’t insult them. She said she knew many of them and what they did was very important.
Unlike the GOP, she believes in the Constitutional right of the media to question our government.
But she let them know that they were not going to parrot Republican cant as if it was reality.
I just want to remind everyone of that, now that Kevin McCarthy, in one of his fake, simpering, churlish, manufactured-outrage press performances, has said that he problem with the debt ceiling debacle is that the Democrats are “so far to the socialist wing.”
Oh, and he got very, very excited about it, and started making his trademark Ethel Merman gesticulations.
Projection and Orwelian double-talk is really all the GOP has left.
Only two more performances of Peter Mattei starring in a new Don Giovanni at the Met Opera.
I precis for Air Mail.
So now the House Democratic leader is shillling for the Republicans’ spending freeze. Biden & co’s surrender signalling has made the GOP’s demands ever-more outrageous. The White House has disastrously bungled their response to GOP hostage-taking. They simply refuse to take the actions necessary to protect Biden’s own presidency, let alone the country’s economy.
Negotiating with himself. Pre-emptive capitulation. It’s as though Biden learned nothing from watching Obama get mauled by the GOP.
If that doesn’t say it all about the deception, intolerance, and hypocrisy of the right wing.
