Anti-Liberal Rachets

The repugs always play a long game - every short-term victory is a building block in their ultimate authoritarian fortress.

Thus, their "crazy" behavior over the debt limit accomplished much more than just eliminating the domestic discretionary budget.

David Atkins, thereisnospoon:

The longest-lasting impact of this whole farce has been to create yet another structural impediment to progressive change in Washington. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe this sort of thing in their tremendous new book Winner-Take-All Politics as a "ratchet effect": hidden, arcane structural effects whose result is to create nearly unstoppable advantages for big business, and insurmountable obstacles economic justice for the American People. Other ratchets include the filibuster, unequal vote apportionment in the Senate, "phased out" tax cuts that never really phase out, changes to the way unemployment is calculated, etc.

Now the debt ceiling can be added to that list as perhaps one of the biggest, most important such ratchets of all time.

These ratchets are the tools of the GOP terrorist trade. If Democrats are actually serious about countering this sort of terrorist activity instead of just talking about it, they will move to eliminate as many of these structural hurdles as possible. That should already have happened with the broken filibuster rule, but Senate Democrats didn't have the guts to pull the trigger on it.

The debt ceiling ratchet is an existential crisis for progressives and for the nation. If the GOP is allowed to continue to use this ratchet, the nation will never be able to make the infrastructure investments it needs. That means actually following through on the 14th Amendment solution Joe Biden originally threatened, even at the expense of expanded Executive power. The debt ceiling has always been somewhat preposterous: how is it Constitutional to have to approve debt for spending that has already been approved? Isn't that pretty much the definition of calling into question the "full faith and credit of the United States?"

If Democrats are actually serious about their recent rhetoric, they will need to nip the terrorists in the bud by removing this latest ratchet from their arsenal.