Boehner’s Shutdown Strategy is Working Out Pretty Well

October 7, 2013October 7, 2013Danny Vinik 4 Comments

Democrats are still underestimating this man.

We’re into the second week of the government shutdown and rapidly approaching the debt ceiling deadline. Republicans are overwhelmingly taking the blame for the shutdown and still have no leverage in the negotiations. Democrats are still unified in their support for a clean continuing resolution. That doesn’t sound like a good situation for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his party, right? Wrong.

In fact, this shutdown has worked out pretty well for Boehner. He’s kept his party unified while slowly ramping down their demands. Liberals dismiss the importance of party unity too quickly. They have clamored for the past week that the speaker should bring a clean CR up in the House and allow a vote on it. Such a bill would likely pass (despite Boehner’s bizarre refutation of that yesterday) and the shutdown would end. But this ignores the political reality of the situation. Conservative Republicans would go crazy at such a move. They may try to challenge Boehner’s speakership. Club for Growth and other conservative organizations may immediately look to primary moderate Republicans who voted for the bill. If these outside groups didn’t have much power, then Boehner and moderate Republicans could ignore them. But they are powerful. They have money and an influential grassroots networks. The Tea Party can’t simply be brushed away as an inconvenience. This means that a clean CR is simply not an option. Liberals who call for Boehner to bring one to the floor are ignoring the political dynamics that exist in the Republican party.

Another positive for Boehner is that he has a successfully merged the government shutdown and debt ceiling fights. It quickly became apparent last week that any shutdown deal would have to raise the debt ceiling as well as there was not time for two fiscal fights. Yet, this is a huge win for the Republican Party. Whatever final deal that the parties work out, Republicans will be able to tell their constituents that they broke Obama’s promise not to negotiate on the debt limit. If Boehner had split his party in half and passed a clean CR, he would’ve faced a debt ceiling fight a few weeks later and Obama would have held firm on not negotiating. In the end, Boehner would have had to raise the debt ceiling without getting anything in return (or anything remotely substantial). He understands how catastrophic a default would be and would never have allowed it to happen. In order to show that he extracted concessions out of Obama for raising the debt ceiling, he had to combine that fight with the one over the budget. He has accomplished that as well.

The Republican party is also taking a political hit each day the shutdown continues, but it’s highly unlikely to threaten their majority in the House and that’s what really matters. It may make it more difficult for them to take back the Senate, but with Obama in office, a Republican Senate won’t accomplish anything anyways. Politically it might help them for the 2016 presidential election, but controlling both houses of Congress in 2014 won’t allow Republicans to accomplish much legislatively. If the shutdown truly risked their House majority, it would be a big deal, but it doesn’t. In addition, the piecemeal bills the House has passed to fund the politically toxic aspects of the shutdown have given Republicans a talking point they can use to deflect blame. The political consequences of this shutdown simply aren’t very large.

Part of that is because the shutdown is actually not that harmful. The negative economic effects are minimal, especially with half of the furloughed workers returning to work today and all of them receiving back pay for their missed work. In fact, 83% of government spending is happening as scheduled. That’s not to say that the other 17% is minimal. It isn’t. There are some truly terrible parts of this crisis – NIH patients not receiving cancer treatment and research ruined – but it’s a sad truth that the effects of the shutdown are limited. Most Americans aren’t feeling them and the national parks and monuments being closed – while frustrating and disappointing to many tourists – isn’t a big deal. The longer the shutdown continues, the more it will become a true crisis that requires an immediate solution. But it will likely be over in less than two weeks as both parties understand the need to find a solution before we breach the debt ceiling. The effects of a government shutdown from October 1st to October 17th aren’t that big.

Finally, Boehner may earn his party substantial policy concessions from Obama and Senate Democrats. If the speaker had listened to all those calling for a clean CR, he would’ve received the sequester level cuts and nothing else, including nothing in return for raising the debt ceiling. Now, he has already locked in sequestration and will receive something else for a combined deal on both the government shutdown and debt ceiling. That may be the repeal of the medical device tax, some larger deal with chained CPI or a mechanism to spur tax reform. Whatever it is, it’ll be more than he would’ve accomplished by passing a clean CR, all while keeping his party unified and limiting the negative political consequences of the shutdown. The Tea Party will likely be angry at the final deal as some are OK with breaching the debt limit, but Boehner and moderate Republicans can turn to them and say they did absolutely everything they could to fight Obama and Senate Democrats.

It’s easy for liberals to look at Boehner’s position and see a weak leader who has no strategy or endgame and is terrified of the Tea Party. That’s not an entirely wrong description, but it doesn’t mean he is ineffective and it ignores the fact that Boehner has accomplished quite a bit the past week. Once again, Democrats are underestimating him.

Debt Ceiling Negotiations Are Now Almost Unavoidable

October 2, 2013Danny Vinik 2 Comments

Now that the government shutdown does not seem to be ending anytime soon, liberals are going to have to accept the fact that the debt ceiling is no longer non-negotiable, at least from a messaging standpoint. With both sides digging in, there seems to be little hope of solving the government shutdown before October 17 when we hit the debt limit. That means that any negotiations over a continuing resolution – which will happen eventually – will also have to include a debt ceiling raise. From Politico today:

Reid is highly unlikely to accept a budget deal if it does not increase the debt ceiling, Democratic sources said Tuesday. If the House GOP won’t back the Senate’s stopgap plan by later this week, Democrats are prepared to argue that it makes little sense to agree to a short-term spending bill if Congress is forced to resolve another fiscal crisis in just a matter of days.

A White House official said Tuesday night that the president could get behind Reid’s strategy.

Across the Capitol, House Republicans were quickly coming to a similar conclusion. Republicans were internally weighing including a debt ceiling hike in their demands to convene a House-Senate conference committee to discuss a bill to reopen the government. In the coming days, the GOP leadership is likely to change its rhetoric, with Republicans arguing about government funding and the debt ceiling in the same breath.

The two issues are now inherently connected. The president can maintain his position that he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, but it will be harder to prove that is the case. In a worst case scenario, Democrats actually do negotiate over the debt ceiling and it becomes a piece in the compromise. That would once against set precedent for the debt ceiling to be used as an extortion device. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) cannot let that happen.

But even the best case scenario is not very satisfying. In that situation, Reid declares that Congress must raise the debt limit and Republicans acquiesce. Except because of the tight schedule, the two sides continue negotiating over the CR. Eventually, they come to some type of agreement and both sides pass a bill with that includes a debt ceiling increase. In this case, the debt ceiling was never part of the negotiations and was never used as an extortion device, but that’s hard to prove. The media will analyze the deal as if it was part of a compromise. Republicans will head home to their constituents and say that they made the Democrats negotiate over the debt ceiling. They will say they broke President Obama’s no-negotiating position. Democrats will have no way to prove otherwise. It will be their word versus the Republican’s and the final deal will have a debt ceiling increase in it. Once again, the precedent will be set for using it as an extortion device.

There is one way to avoid all of this though: President Obama can unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely to happen. The Administration ruled out using the 14th Amendment again yesterday and minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin seems even more absurd. Nevertheless, this would eliminate the need to raise the debt ceiling and prevent any negotiation over it. If Obama is really determined to not negotiate over the debt ceiling, he will look at both options carefully, because negotiating is now unavoidable.

Americans Still Don’t Understand the Debt Ceiling

October 1, 2013Danny Vinik 2 Comments

I don’t mean understand it in terms of what it actually is (though I don’t think they understand that either). They don’t understand the consequences of it. Breaching the debt ceiling would be catastrophic, causing irreversible long-term effects on our debt and economy. That’s not hyperbole. The market doesn’t believe that we will breach the debt ceiling, because it would be too idiotic for John Boehner to allow that to happen. The current government shutdown is a drag on our economy and harms many different aspects of people’s daily lives. But a default is many orders of magnitude worse. Yet, a new Quinnipiac Poll today suggests that Americans are a bit confused about which is more dangerous: breaching the debt ceiling or a government shutdown.

Raising the debt ceiling is non-negotiable.

The poll finds that by 72% to 22% margin, Americans do not want Congress to shut down the federal government over Obamacare. That’s good. However, a smaller margin (64% to 27%) do not want Congress to default over Obamacare. It’s good that in both cases Americans understand that it’s not acceptable to use a fiscal crisis as leverage to extort the opposite party. But these polls demonstrate that more Americans are OK with that extortion when the hostage is the debt ceiling than when it is government funding,

That’s backwards and needs to change. Part of the reason for this may be because this poll was conducted over the weekend, right before a government shutdown, while a possible default is still a few weeks away. Nevertheless, the media must do a better job explaining the consequences of a default to the American people. There should be no pretense that there will be negotiations over the debt ceiling. That’s not how this works. President Obama screwed up in 2011 by negotiating over it, but that was an outlier. It did not set a precedent.

Speaker Boehner will raise the debt ceiling, because if he doesn’t, it will go down as one of the single worst actions a legislator has done in the history of the United States. Once again, that’s not hyperbole. We need to stop treating this as a back-and-forth game, trying to guess what the speaker will do, and start calling it what it is: a foregone conclusion. Boehner will raise the debt ceiling, because it would be apocalyptic not to. The American people need to know that as well.