Finger-pointing will not save anyone if default leads to economic collapse

Is it the Biden standard? Or the Republican Default on America?

Even as negotiators continue to halt talks to resolve the federal debt ceiling deadlock, members of both sides are positioning themselves to try to dodge blame for the economic fallout if things go wrong. Democrats berate Republicans for holding the debt ceiling hostage to appease “extreme MAGA” conservatives bent on cutting government spending. Republicans are slapping Democrats for waiting too long to open talks and not taking the GOP’s demands seriously.

But deep down — and in some cases not so deep — officials from both sides know that they will all pay if they don’t get a deal, the government defaults, and Americans lose money and jobs and gain confidence in their financial well-being and future.

“I would hate to be the politician trying to explain to people when the economy is in the toilet that it’s not my fault, it’s their fault,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said. ‘Yeah, that’s not going to work. They will flush us all.”

Polls have suggested that Mr. Graham is correct. A Washington Post-ABC News Poll released earlier this month shows that the public is divided over who will bear the blame, with a significant portion of independents saying the two sides should share the blame equally.

And some on Capitol Hill say the political backlash will be well deserved if Congress and the White House manage to manipulate the situation so badly that officials plunge into an entirely avoidable crisis and shake both the economy and the retirement accounts of millions of Americans .

“I can’t fathom that someone who was able to prevent so much damage to our country, our economy and our global standing would allow that to happen,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat, who is one of the pressures on his party to enter into negotiations sooner. “It would be absolutely reprehensible. Everyone should be hammered.”

But that likely reverberation has not yet motivated negotiators to come to an agreement and pave the way for an economic sigh of relief. Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana, the moderator for House Republicans in the talks, abruptly left a Friday negotiating session with government representatives at the Capitol, accusing them of being “unreasonable,” and the talks were temporarily suspended. Suddenly, the road to a speedy agreement that Speaker Kevin McCarthy had seen Thursday was strewn with obstacles once again.

Such ups and downs in budget negotiations are fairly standard and can be performative as well as substantive. Both sides have to bow to show their respective powers to hang on strong and pull out all the stops they can get. But there are real differences in the positions of Democrats and Republicans on many issues at the negotiating table. A positive result is not a certainty, despite regular high-level assurances that the United States cannot and will not default in the coming days.

If it does happen, lawmakers and government officials want you to know they didn’t do it.

“Here we are on the verge of a Biden default,” West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito declared both in person and through a press release this week, a refrain increasingly popular with Republicans — that this is all Mr. Biden’s was doing because he refused to talk to them earlier and allow enough time to come to an agreement.

Not so, against the Democrats. “We are in the midst of a GOP-manufactured default crisis because House Republicans have chosen to try to hold our economy, our small businesses and ordinary Americans hostage through unreasonable ransom demands,” New York Democrat Representative Hakeem Jeffries and the minority leader, said.

Republicans have an answer. They claim that since they pushed legislation through the House last month that would increase the debt limit and implement austerity, they have bragging rights and immunity from any criticism because they are the only ones who have acted so far – although it has been done in a big way. scale was done. knew the bill could never pass the Senate with a Democratic majority.

“I don’t know how we own it if we raise the debt limit,” Mr. McCarthy said at the White House when asked if he was willing to face the fallout from bankruptcy. His colleagues share his opinion.

“In my district, I don’t think it would be a huge problem,” Oklahoma Republican Representative Tom Cole said. “I voted to raise the debt ceiling. Show me a person on the other side who did.

Moreover, Republicans know that traditionally it is the president who takes the credit or blame for the state of the economy, even when the executive branch is far beyond its control of circumstances.

Democrats mock the Republican claims. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and Majority Leader, dubbed the House legislation the Default on America Act, to try to capture both its impact and death upon arrival in the Senate. He and his fellow Democrats say they refuse to reward Republicans for what they see as highly irresponsible actions that endanger the country’s economy — even though both sides have used the debt limit as a bargaining chip over the years.

“From the beginning, the Democrats have said — I have said — that this process requires bipartisanship,” Schumer said this week. “This is how we prevented a default under President Trump. That’s how we avoided default under President Biden, and that’s how we should avoid default this time. Brinkmanship, hiding plans, hostage taking – none of that will get us any closer to a solution.

The two sides can continue to trade shots. But until they trade negotiating positions they can agree on, the threat of default hangs over Washington and the nation. And when that happens, those involved may find that the public makes no distinction between who did or said what when, but will hold them all accountable.