Klutz Biden does it again

It was the day US President Biden took a big smack. He had just addressed a class of Air Force cadets, then turned to step off the stage and, baf, tripped over a sandbag, flat on the ground. That same day, the Senate passed a bill that would ensure the solvency of the US government. On the website of the right-wing TV channel Fox News, the video of the frail president was at the top all day Friday morning. The law that saved the American and perhaps the world economy from disaster had sunk to the bottom of the news in a day.

The votes by which the House of Representatives (Wednesday) and the Senate (Thursday) approved the Tax Responsibility Act confirm the instinct of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. While this law is the result of negotiations between the Democratic president and Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, there’s no question which side is happiest with this outcome. The Democrats have always refrained from loud rhetoric and voted overwhelmingly in favor of a proposal of which the president said: it has to be done. The far-right Republicans waved their fists at their leader, whom they call a “traitor.”

High stakes

President Biden, for all his stumbling and stammering, turned out to be an effective negotiator who has played the high stakes of the Republicans down to a low pile of chips. And he doesn’t have to advertise it himself, his political opponents do that for him; from speaker McCarthy calling the presidential negotiating team “smart and professional,” to disgruntled Republicans saying their leader has let the president strip them.

Thus, the political meaning of this week transcends the content of the law. Democratic Party shows that it can cover the political center. Republicans must hope that the internal divisions do not lead to the impeachment of their party leader as Speaker of the House and a seizure of power by the most conservative part of the party.

“This shows once again what is possible when we act with the common good of the country in mind,” Biden wrote after the Senate vote. Republican leader McCarthy congratulated himself on getting his compromise through Congress, but he knows that a third of his group in the House and a large majority of his party in the Senate are not jubilant. On the far right wing of the Republican Party, his compromise was qualified as “a shit sandwich.”

Now that a majority of Republicans in Congress have approved a bill that is a far cry from the austerity bill they put forward in April that served as the opening bid for negotiations with the White House, the question is why? Is this why they have caused nervousness in the international financial markets? Is this what they’ve been paralyzing American politics for for weeks?

There was agreement from the left to the moderate right on the necessity of raising the debt ceiling. There is agreement from the left to the far right about the relatively small actual impact of this law on the budget.

Absurd process

Bernie Sanders, the left-wing independent senator, voted against because it cuts social programs for the poor and the elderly and because the law gives energy companies ample room for new polluting projects. But he also said that the law only “modest cuts” includes in the field of care, education and other areas. And that “this law prevents an economic disaster by raising the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025 – after which we will have to struggle through this whole absurd process again.”

Not an idle prediction, given the direction the Republican Party is moving in. Take a look at the negative voters in the party and one characteristic stands out: the majority of them are ‘young’ deputies. Of the 71 dissidents in the House, 53 were elected in the Trump era. In the Senate, the ratio is half and half, but relatively more of the senators from the ‘Trump generation’ voted against it.

This is perhaps the most important result of this, in hindsight, virtually meaningless chicken game: The events of the past few months show how radical the new recruits of the Republican Party are and how far they are willing to go to undermine the federal government. Now anti-federalism is an old and respected agenda of conservative America – “fiscal conservative and against the Washington bureaucracy” is a golden oldie in Republican rhetoric. But this young generation is pushing the crusade against the federal government to a head – always with the exception of the defense budget, by the way.

Worrying mountain of debt

The debt ceiling was just another battleground for the Conservatives on which to continue this battle. That they are not concerned with limiting the indeed worrying mountain of US debt (more than 31,400 billion dollars, almost 30,000 billion euros), is evidenced by the fact that in 2017 the ‘older’ voters all agreed to a generous tax cut, which was largely for the better. came to the richest Americans and caused the government debt to swell considerably.

Or from the fact that they tried with all their might to prevent a strengthening of the tax authorities, and thus an increase in government revenues. Conservative Republicans keep arguing that “Washington” doesn’t work, and their bills aim to make that a reality.

Internal tensions take Republicans into the 2024 election year, with their current presidential candidates ranging so far from the radical to the slightly less radical anti-Washington. The question is to what extent that will produce a winning strategy in the general election.

Meanwhile, Biden stubbornly persists in seeking compromise and achieves tangible results in Congress at key moments. In analyses, his need for cooperation is regularly dismissed as old-fashioned and naive. The reasoning is that it is impossible to do business with the current radical Republicans.

But Biden has shown a few times now that he is capable of getting the last moderate Republicans on his side. He praises those exceptions at length, as he named Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in his statement Thursday. For example, he makes optimal use of the Republican division and the question is rather when that party will split than when Biden will fall over.