Kevin McCarthy Put Debt Ceiling at Center of His Deal with Party Extremists

The Republican Party was obviously dedicated to establishing a plutocracy long before it became so obviously dedicated to establishing a theocracy. The latter is a noisier process, but the former is far closer to the essential identity of the party. It’s also a project many of our darling Never Trump allies never truly abandoned. Liz Cheney did not discover her inner Keynesian when she discovered the previous administration* was despoiling the Republican brand. Even a lot of the Never Trump energy was dedicated to preserving that brand so the party could get back to its real work of shoving the wealth of the nation upward. In the bad acid trip that is the new House of Representatives, beneath the gaudier atrocities promised by run by the likes of Jim Jordan, is a whole series of landmines set under what’s left of the American social welfare infrastructure. From Bloomberg:

One of the main demands of the GOP faction McCarthy had to negotiate with was using the nation’s debt limit to try to force deep cuts in the federal budget. The issue will come to a head sometime after July 1 when the $31 trillion limit will need to be raised to prevent a default on debt payments. “There will be no clean increase in the debt ceiling,” Pennsylvania Republican Scott Perry, chair of House Freedom Caucus and one of the leaders of the mutiny, said Friday. Arkansas Representative French Hill, who helped negotiate the deal, told reporters that there is a commitment that spending cuts will be tied to any increase in the debt ceiling. That is sure to hit solid opposition in the Democratic-controlled Senate and from President Joe Biden. Republicans want “spending reforms to be connected with any advance of the debt ceiling,” said Hill.

(Perry is the guy who Cassidy Hutchinson said was begging for a preemptive pardon for his involvement in the insurrection, and Hill was the guy who, during the clown show marathon, pitched Kevin McCarthy as the speaker who would bring back the golden age of the Coolidge Administration. These people crazy.)

The informal debt ceiling commitment comes on top of changes to House rules that will empower the conservative rebels to enforce the deal. The binding changes are to be voted on by the House. One of the most significant changes would allow just one lawmaker to call for an immediate vote of no confidence in the speaker, effectively giving McCarthy’s detractors within his own party a veto over his actions. Democrats had raised the threshold to a majority when they controlled the House.

I’m sure it’s a nice bit of insurance for the Angry Children’s Brigade to have, but they really won’t have to knuckle McCarthy on the fiscal elements of his articles of surrender. He knows from long experience that plutocracy and the money-power are the connective tissue that link Reaganite and Trumpian conservatism—hell, that link Coolidge and Trumpian conservatism, for all that.

McCarthy also knows that the money-power and the donor class are his strongest bulwark against the real crazies in his caucus. If he keeps faith with the money-power—by, say, trying to hand it the Social Security trust fund to play with—it will stand by him. So sometime this summer, McCarthy will attempt to leverage the debt ceiling and the full faith and credit of the United States in order to chew up Social Security and Medicare. He will try to bluff the Democratic Senate and the White House, and he will fail. And that deal he cut on vacating the chair will start to look a little unappetizing.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.