Kevin McCarthy Is Running an Even More Desperate Debt-Ceiling Playbook Than John Boehner Did 10 Years Ago

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy jaunted up to New York on Monday to give a speech at the New York Stock Exchange about his proposal to avert a Debt Ceiling Crisis that he's simultaneously trying to create. To be clear, raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending. It authorizes the United States government to meet its debt obligations on spending that already happened. If McCarthy and his merry band are interested in cutting spending, they could craft a budget that does just that and battle the Democratic Senate to reach a compromise bill that President Joe Biden would sign. Instead, House Republicans have decided to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage, thereby threatening the stability of the world financial system. Maybe that's why McCarthy delivered his big speech on Wall Street.

It would actually be more accurate, though, to say House Republicans are going back to this strategy. This stuff was all the rage back when the Tea Party fanatics were preparing the ground for MAGA, and a beardless Senator Ted Cruz was enticing various House halfwits to come along with him on government shutdowns and games of debt-ceiling chicken in order to force the Obama administration to cut spending. This was all rooted in concerns about Our National Debt, or at least performing concern in front of as many people as possible, which might explain why these same Republicans added trillions to that Debt a couple of years later when they voted to pass Donald Trump's tax cut for rich people and corporations.

This current chapter of the story is more of the same. It's been going on since at least February, when Republicans started with the debt ceiling threats without actually making any demands. Pure performance. Rep. Tim Burchett said back then that he would not vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances. That is, while his colleagues had no specific demands to release the hostage, he was just promising to shoot the hostage. In the time since, Republicans have been working overtime to backtrack on some members' talk of making adjustments to Social Security and Medicare, and McCarthy drove that home in his speech. He instead emphasized introducing more stringent work requirements for people on foodstamps, a program that made up less than 1.9% of federal spending in 2022. A significant cut there might shave 0.4% off the federal budget. This is theater, like when Republicans pledge to cut NPR, except Americans will go hungry to make it happen. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans announced last month they're embarking on their 1 trillionth attempt to repeal the estate tax.

If your memory's fuzzy, it might feel like the main difference here is that, unlike the Tea Party era, the crazy is coming right from the center of the Republican caucus: the Speaker. But that would involve memory-holing the fact that House Republicans' Obama-era leader, Speaker John Boehner, also once journeyed up to Manhattan in 2011 to tell the Economic Club of New York that "without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase." He ultimately blinked—Boehner was willing to dangle the United States credit rating over the balcony railing, but he was unwilling to let go.

Kevin McCarthy is ultimately far more desperate than Boehner, who at least evinced some real disdain for the nihilists—Ted Cruz chief among them—who made his life a living hell. In contrast, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is Kevin McCarthy's BFF, a trendsetter for the hard right he's beholden to because of his razor-thin majority in the House. He's so beholden that it's almost become secondary whether he himself believes in the debt-ceiling fight. As our nation's first Speaker In Name Only (SINO), he doesn't have a choice.

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