Is there such a thing as a win-win in this zero-sum age of American politics, when Democrats speak of their Republican rivals as a threat to American democracy and Republicans speak of Democrats as a threat to America itself? During Memorial Day weekend, President Joe Biden cut a last-minute deal with the leader of the House Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to avert a catastrophic default on the national debt, agreeing to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025 and to institute around a hundred and eighty billion dollars in G.O.P.-demanded spending cuts over the next two years. On Wednesday, the deal cleared the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, and it appeared headed for Senate passage by Friday, two days before the date the Treasury said that it would run out of money.
Instead of the usual apocalyptic warnings, both Biden and McCarthy served up soothingly retro bromides about the virtues of coming together to do the people’s business. The President talked of “the responsibility of governing” and celebrated “bipartisan compromise.” The Speaker bragged of his accomplishment. “Tonight we made history,” he said, after the bill passed on Wednesday. “I think we did pretty dang good for the American public.” With disaster seemingly averted, and despite loud complaints from politicians on both the left and the right, an unaccustomed and distinctly upbeat tone crept into the political discourse: perhaps, after all, it was still possible to govern from the center and not the extremes. Was this, finally, the Revenge of the Normies?
Washington does love its winners. Thursday morning’s Politico Playbook lauded McCarthy’s “signature win” and the “remarkable feat” he pulled off in getting two-thirds of House Republicans to support any increase in the debt ceiling. Biden, meanwhile, was praised for his “major victory” and the perseverance it took to get there. Other coverage was similarly fulsome. The phrase “victory lap” was used a lot.
The conventional wisdom on McCarthy was that, as Speaker, he was doomed to feckless subservience to the far right, whose votes had reluctantly put him in the chair only after fifteen ballots and a series of concessions that neutered his power. The new conventional wisdom is that McCarthy was underestimated and his Freedom Caucus foes have been, if not tamed, then at least temporarily beaten back. For Biden, whose case for the Presidency was premised on his ability to draw on decades of experience in the capital to broker old-fashioned deals across party lines, the political benefits were almost self-evident, all the more so since the alternative to a deal in this instance could well have been a recession-triggering economic crisis.
But cheerleading is so boring. I found the complaints from the outliers much more revealing, if only about the complainers themselves. Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene called the deal a “shit sandwich,” then voted for it anyway. Other Freedom Caucus types, such as Byron Donalds of Florida, were mad that their colleagues had succumbed to “the pressure in this town” and lost their nerve to actually go through with a default on the national debt. Among Democrats, there was lots of grumbling about giving in to terrorists—and specific anger over a West Virginia natural-gas pipeline that managed to find its way into the package to placate their colleague, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.
In the capital’s endless spin wars, there were solid arguments for why both Biden and McCarthy had lost even as they were winning. The case against Biden’s triumphalism was straightforward: He had promised not to negotiate with Republicans who were holding the debt ceiling hostage to achieve unrelated policy goals, and what, really, did he get for doing it anyway, except preventing the country from careening off a cliff? Progressives were angry enough about the concessions that Bernie Sanders came out against the deal in the Senate. Liberal analysts pointed out that, when President Barack Obama cut a deal in 2011 to avert a Republican-imposed debt catastrophe, he secured a list of his own priorities in addition to raising the debt ceiling itself. Nothing of the sort happened this time for Biden.
As for McCarthy, it was notable that many Democrats were in an unusual state of agreement with Republican hard-liners in their belief that the Speaker was not only not a winner but had possibly even imperilled his already weak hold on power by infuriating the Freedom Caucus members. “With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?” Mike Lee, a G.O.P. senator from Utah, said in a floor speech about what he called “the deal from hell.” Ezra Klein, a liberal columnist for the Times, joked that the measure was so modest that “it was like threatening to detonate a bomb beneath the bank unless the teller gives you $150 and a commemorative mug.”
Certainly, there were worrisome indicators for McCarthy, whose five-seat majority gives him little room for error. On Tuesday night, the Rules Committee passed the measure setting the terms of floor debate for the debt package by a single vote, after two Republicans refused to go along with it. The panel is traditionally the key instrument of a Speaker’s power, with its members chosen specifically for their loyalty; votes on the committee are almost always party line. A Speaker who loses control of the Rules Committee effectively loses control of the House.
The scene was even more dramatic on Wednesday afternoon, when the rule came up for a vote on the House floor. After the allotted time for voting had expired, the measure had not passed, and twenty-nine Republicans had voted against it. A large number of Democrats had been holding back for just such a moment. Then Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, stood and waved a green card. At his signal, the Democrats voted en masse and saved the measure. Later that night, when the debt package itself was voted on, it was not lost on anyone that more Democrats than Republicans had supported it. “It appears that you may have lost control of the floor of the House of Representatives,” Jeffries taunted McCarthy, in a floor speech.
After the votes had been counted, some Democrats were openly spiking the football. “Now we are allowed to say it: we rolled them,” Brad Sherman, a representative from California, said. Some Republicans agreed. “This is a win for Joe Biden,” the Freedom Caucus announced on the group’s official Twitter account. Ah, bipartisanship.
So this is what counts as a great week here in Washington. The weather has been lovely—sunny but neither too hot nor too humid. The global economy is not going to go into a tailspin because a bunch of politicians refused to do their jobs. It would be churlish to point out that many successful rebellions start in the disaffected aftermath of big deals. Or that this particular deal was hardly of the sweeping, historic variety. Or that pretty much no one actually knows the words to “Kumbaya” anymore. Too much optimism, though, also seems wrong. Irrational exuberance about the non-catastrophic is, in my experience, a dangerous state of mind in Washington. 
The Irrational Exuberance of a Non-Catastrophe
Source: News Flash Trending
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