Different feel on the debt ceiling

WASHINGTON

Be afraid.

Be very, very afraid.

This is my chilling, and surprising, takeaway from numerous conversations with administration officials and members of Congress over the last several days about the looming need to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling.

The chilling part is obvious. Having the government shut down, especially briefly, is stupid but survivable. (Economically, that is. The political ramifications are another matter.) We’ve been down this idiotic path before, and we may well be stumbling there again.

But leaving the government unable to borrow enough money to pay the debts it has already incurred is a different matter entirely. Breaching the debt ceiling evokes words like catastrophic and unthinkable, which is why it has never happened.

And why the notion that it might is so surprising. Astonishing, actually. Washington is used to government by crisis and deadline. Our creaky system is capable of rousing itself only when the train is bearing down the tracks.

Reason backward

So my usual way of analyzing these moments is to reason backward: The debt ceiling must be raised. Therefore it will be. The situation will seem to be at an unbreakable stalemate until, suddenly, a solution appears. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief — until the inevitable next act in our political psychodrama. Panic, solve, repeat.

And this could well happen in the coming showdown. Let’s hope so. But steady Washington hands worry that this time really could be different -- and, remember, even edging close to default is costly.

There are four (at least) reasons to worry:

1) House Speaker John Boehner has chosen to play with fire, arguing to his colleagues that the ultimate showdown should be over raising the debt ceiling rather than extending government funding.

Boehner’s calculation appears to be twofold: that Republicans have more to lose from a shut-down fight (you may recall that didn’t go so well for Newt Gingrich in 1995) and that Republicans will therefore have more leverage with Democrats and President Obama if they make their stand on the debt ceiling.

This strategy hinges on the assumption that Obama will blink. This has some basis in reality: He’s blinked before, and blinking in the face of imminent disaster might be the prudent thing to do.

Yet the president has been asserting for months that he will not negotiate over the full faith and credit of the United States. This attitude is a trifle ahistoric: Presidents, including Obama, always make deals and offer concessions to secure an increase. But previous Congresses, however, have not been willing to take the debt-ceiling extortion racket to the brink.

2) Mitch McConnell is AWOL. The Senate minority leader played a crucial role, along with Vice President Joe Biden, in defusing the last crisis, over the fiscal cliff. Never mind that the Kentucky Republican got a pretty good deal — Democrats ended up with way less new tax revenue than Boehner had offered, and lost leverage to obtain more. He’s taken grief for raising any taxes at all, and is desperate to fend off a tea party-fueled primary challenge.

3) The insistence on defunding Obamacare introduces an unfulfillable new demand into an already complicated equation. That’s not going to happen, but enough House members have gotten themselves so worked up over the issue that Boehner’s ploy to give them a symbolic vote and move on with funding the government blew up,

Lunatic strategy

You know things are bad when The Wall Street Journal editorial page starts sounding rational. As the Journal described the lunatic strategy, “Republicans must threaten to crash their Zeros into the aircraft carrier of Obamacare. ... Kamikaze missions rarely turn out well, least of all for the pilots.”

4) The low-hanging fruit has been plucked. Taxes have been raised on the wealthiest Americans. Discretionary spending has been cut to the bone (with the sequester, beyond). The contours of a deal are as ever: blending entitlement changes and new revenue through tax reform. But the obstacles to a deal also remain firmly in place. Serious talks are close to non-existent. The ability to quickly concoct a mini-bargain is limited.

Unduly pessimistic? Overwrought? Let’s hope so.

Washington Post Writers Group