Republican congressional leaders make it clear they intend to take the US over the financial cliff if President Joe Biden won’t agree to gut the economic recovery bills Democrats passed in the first two years of Biden’s administration, which pulled the economy out of Donald Trump’s COVID recession.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined 42 other Republican senators who signed a letter organized by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) May 6 declaring themselves in lockstep with House radicals who have pledged to stop any extension of the debt ceiling to pay bills the Trump administration incurred, unless Democrats first agrees to “substantive spending and budget reforms,” which include a 22% across-the-board cut in non-defense spending.
Those cuts, which House Republicans passed April 26, would include slashing health care, education, science, justice and labor. Republicans would include the Veterans Administration and veterans services in the cuts and force participants in Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to prove they meet a work-reporting requirement or qualify for an exemption. The Social Security Administration would have to close field offices and shorten operating hours, as well as lay off workers, which would mean delays in ruling on disability requests and processing retirement claims.
Congressional Democrats say the cuts could mean losing 11,000 FBI agents, and 2,400 Border Patrol agents. The 4,468 new full-time positions for wildfire fighters would be cut by 1,754 jobs, and those who remain would have their pay cut. About 1,000 current firefighters could lose their jobs, and plans to increase their pay and improve working conditions would have to be scrapped.
Meanwhile, Republicans doubled down on protecting wealthy tax cheaters by including the first bill they passed after taking the House majority, Joan McCarter noted at Daily Kos. That bill rescinds the more than $70 billion in IRS funding included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to help the agency modernize and more effectively do its job. The Congressional Budget Office determined that the Republican bill actually adds to the deficit, finding it would cost the treasury more than $114 billion in the next decade.
All of these cuts, the White House notes, citing a Moody’s Analytics report, “would lead to 780,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2024 and would meaningfully increase the risk of recession.”
“Altogether, this legislation would not only risk default, recession, widespread job loss, and years of higher interest rates, but also make devastating cuts to programs that hard-working Americans and the middle-class count on,” the statement continues. “The bill would make it easier for wealthy tax cheats to avoid the taxes they owe, even as House Republicans are advancing other proposals that would spend trillions more on tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and big corporations, undoing much or all of the deficit reduction in this legislation.”
Senate Republicans hope the filibuster threat foils the attempt by House Democrats to force a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase with a “discharge petition,” if they got five Republican members to sign on, to give them a bare majority of 218 House members.
Even if Democrats forced the vote in the House and passed the debt ceiling increase on its own, Republicans could stop it in the Senate with a filibuster, which 41 senators could uphold.
That leaves Biden the option of declaring that Congress is failing in its constitutional duty to pay the debts it had incurred, so as president, he is constitutionally bound to uphold the clear directive of Section Four of the 14th Amendment, which states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
Cornell Law School Professor Michael C. Dorf noted in the Boston Globe that the provision was added to the Constitution after the Civil War but, as the Supreme Court recognized in the 1935 case of Perry v. United States, “its language indicates a broader connotation.” Public debt, the court observed, extends beyond payments for costs the Union incurred fighting the Confederacy; it also extends beyond the bonds at issue in Perry, “embracing whatever concerns the integrity of the public obligations.”
Republicans hope to wreck the economy, as defaulting on the national debt would do, and blame it on Biden because they have no other hope of winning back the White House in 2024.
By most objective data, Biden has done a great job in restoring the crippled economy he inherited from Trump, who left office with a net loss of three million jobs and a 6.3% unemployment rate in January 2020, as well as inflated prices as supply lines were tangled during the COVID pandemic.
Biden got the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act through Congress narrowly controlled by Democrats in March 2021. The bill provided $1,400 direct payments to individuals; extended unemployment benefits; expanded the child tax credit; and provided assistance for rent, mortgages, utilities and small businesses; a national vaccine program; and aid to state, local and tribal governments.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed into law Nov. 15, 2021, provided $1 trillion for roads and bridges, power infrastructure, passenger and freight rail, broadband, drinking water, western water storage, public transit, airports, water & soil purification, ports, electric vehicles and transportation safety programs.
The CHIPS and Science Act signed into law Aug. 9, 2022 provided $280 billion to help strengthen America’s manufacturing and technology capabilities, after a pandemic-related chip shortage disrupted auto production and drove up car prices and inflation.
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law Aug. 16, 2022, provided tax credits and rebates for renewable technologies, such as solar and wind-driven generators and electric vehicles. It also extends Affordable Care Act subsides by three years through 2025, which helped 7 million Americans get free health insurance.
Under Biden’s economic program, the US has gained 12.7 million jobs, including 253,000 in April, and the overall unemployment rate dropped to 3.4%, the lowest rate in a half-century. Black unemployment dropped to a record low 4.7%. Wage growth in April brought the annualized growth rate over the last three months to 4.2%. That’s relatively good news for workers, but the White House is frustrated that so many people feel the economy is in poor shape, when his record on jobs is unrivaled among presidencies since Lyndon Johnson. A CNN poll in March showed seven in 10 Americans rated the economy as somewhat or very poor and three in five expect the economy to be poor a year from now. And the Federal Reserve, determined to cool the economy to bring inflation down to 2%, increased benchmark interest rates to 5%.
So Republicans are determined to sabotage the recovery, and corporate media will continue to play down Biden’s accomplishments. Pundits will attack Biden for refusing to negotiate with the deadbeat Republicans. But he has the constitutional authority to pay the nation’s bills, and MAGA Republicans be damned. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2023
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