With GOP intransigence once again threatening a debt-ceiling debacle, President Biden is singing a much harsher tune than his younger self. gdebenedetti reports on what Biden learned from the 2011 crisis
Photo: Xinhua /eyevine/ReduxBarack Obama was fed up, but Joe Biden was incredulous.weren’t going to negotiate anymore, and the American economy looked like it was on the verge of implosion thanks to an impending default on U.S. government debt. With the Treasury running out of room to borrow money, Republicans refused to raise the so-called debt ceiling without concessions.
This isn’t the product of a sudden pivot, nor a Trump-age awakening, nor even some new fiscal paradigm. After all, the Republican-led Congress hiked or suspended the debt ceiling four more times before Obama and Biden left office, and they did it sans global-economy-threatening brinkmanship.
It’s all a long way from when Obama saw serious opportunity in a budgetary “Grand Bargain” with Boehner, both on its perceived policy merits and because of the prospect of winning a bipartisan economic agreement to kickstart his re-election campaign. At least at the beginning, the negotiations involved substantive proposals to shift revenue sources and cut social programs.
As a result, Biden seems sure the GOP will face the blame for any standoff. And those around Biden now understand that McCarthy still has his own mountain to climb to even get his caucus to align on what it wants from the coming fight. While he has said he won’t demand cuts to Medicare and Social Security, that hasn’t stopped Biden’s White House from publicly insisting that McCarthy’s party will end up in that politically toxic spot.
Of course, something similar happened in 2011. Then, the Treasury Department secretly began to explore the concept of prioritizing its debt payments to try and dodge the blow of a default. But no one took talk of
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