Amidst the continuing debt ceiling crisis and stop-start negotiations between the White House and House Republicans, a disappointing realization for liberals is sinking in: President Biden will likely end up making substantial concessions on spending cuts to avert the crisis.
So, many are asking: Did Biden and Democrats screw this whole thing up?
After the last time we had a showdown like this, in 2011, many Democrats concluded their own party had botched it. They believed President Obama should not have negotiated with Republicans on the debt ceiling, that he gave away too much on spending, and that he emboldened the GOP to make similar demands in the future.
Yet despite Biden’s initial talk of holding firm and not negotiating, and despite liberal commentators’ dreams of using executive authority to defuse the debt ceiling bomb, things seem to have ended up in exactly the same place.
To understand why, it’s worth retracing the tactical and strategic choices that the White House and congressional Democrats made over the past several months. Some indeed have held up poorly.
But in my view liberals’ expectations of holding strong with a refusal to negotiate, or in circumventing congressional Republicans entirely, were untethered from reality. There was no obvious and achievable way to avoid this crisis. Spending cuts of some kind were inevitable once the GOP took the House, and the question remaining is just how bad they’ll end up being.
The White House’s strategy — and how it went wrong — briefly explained
To avoid repeating what they saw as Obama’s mistakes, Biden’s White House started off with a two-pronged strategy.
First, they said they wouldn’t negotiate over the debt ceiling at all, demanding it be off the table — though the catch here is that they always knew they’d have to negotiate with the GOP over spending later this year. Republicans control the House and government funding expires September 30, so there would always…
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