Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer, Jan. 2019
Once again, with a Democratic president in the White House, Republicans are playing a dangerous game of chicken with America’s debt ceiling. The GOP did this under President Barack Obama in 2011 as well. This article from the Brookings Institution lays out some of the possible scary consequences of a U.S. debt default, including:
–A deep recession
–A big drop in the stock market
–Higher interest rates
–Failure to pay Social Security and Medicare recipients
–Failure to pay our U.S. Treasury obligations
The pain of such a failure likely would be felt by every American family, and America’s place as the go-to safe harbor for foreign investment and the go-to currency (and thus, our influence in the world) could be jeopardized. Once again, therefore, Republicans correctly need to be blamed for this crisis of their making. But to get there, and solve the crisis, there is something that President Joe Biden and leading Democrats should be saying:“Republicans need to behave like grown-ups, and pay the bills that they ran up.”
Portraying themselves as the grown-ups in the room, and conversely, portraying the Republicans as petulant children, has worked well for Democrats ever since Donald Trump sat in the White House. Recall, for example, incoming U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer taking it to Trump in front of the TV cameras in a December 2018 Oval Office meeting, just after the Democrats had won the majority in the House of Representatives. At one point, Pelosi and Schumer got Trump to say:
I am proud to shut down the government…. I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I won’t blame you for it.
This was precisely the contrast between the grown-up Democrats and the childish Republicans that had worked well since Trump first took office, and Pelosi and Schumer capitalized on the moment. According to the Politico article linked above:
After the meeting, Schumer and Pelosi, standing on the White House driveway, were quick to pounce on his comments, with Pelosi making sure to brand any government closure the “Trump shutdown.”
“He has admitted in this meeting that he will take responsibility,” Pelosi said. “The Trump shutdown is something that can be avoided and that the American people do not need at this time of economic uncertainty, and people losing jobs and the market in a mood and the rest. It is a luxury — the Trump shutdown is a luxury that the American people cannot afford.”
What then happened was that Republicans did shut down the federal government, and voters blamed Donald Trump significantly more than Congressional Democrats. That does not even include the voters who primarily blamed Congressional Republicans as well. Likewise, in the current GOP-manufactured crisis over the debt ceiling, we believe that, once again, portraying the Democrats as the grown-ups in the room, and Republicans as stubborn, irresponsible children, will assist the Democrats politically, and in this case help the country avoid a disastrous default.
The present situation is also a good time to remember that Republicans like to call themselves “the party of personal responsibility.” Democrats should remind voters that the test of whether there is any truth to that GOP slogan is whether Republicans in Congress will step up now to pay America’s bills that they helped to incur.
Photo by AFGE, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/exitiB
