Month: August 2011

Romney Opposes Debt Deal — Who Cares?

Buck Banks

As president, my plan would have produced a budget that was cut, capped and balanced – not one that opens the door to higher taxes and puts defense cuts on the table. President Obama’s leadership failure has pushed the economy to the brink at the eleventh hour and 59th minute. While I appreciate the extraordinarily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican Members of Congress in, I personally cannot support this deal.

— Mitt Romney, after being silent on the topic for weeks, issues a statement opposing the debt ceiling agreement reached last night.

Welcome to the Era of Extortion Politics

Jon Ponder

By manufacturing the crisis over the extension of the debt ceiling for their own political gain, tea bagger Republicans not only broke one of their many sacred campaign pledges to voters last year, they also managed to regress American politics farther than ever from their constitutional ideals by ushering in a new era of what Steve Benen calls “extortion politics”:

I think this is arguably one of the more important realizations to take away from the current political landscape. Republicans aren’t just radicalized, aren’t just pursuing an extreme agenda, and aren’t just allergic to compromise. The congressional GOP is also changing the very nature of governing in ways with no modern precedent.

Welcome to the normalization of extortion politics.

In the debt-ceiling hostage fiction, Republicans are the hostage takers — the extortionists — while the U.S. economy and the financial well-being of American families are their victims. The hostage negotiator, of course, the would-be hero in the piece, is Pres. Obama.

Unfortunately, in this political drama, the hero did not ride to the victims’ rescue. Instead, he legitimized the terrorists’ demands by negotiating with them. By negotiating with them, he allowed them to win — not on points but on politics, which was really all that mattered to them.

Jonathan Chait traces the president’s undoing back to his budget battles with the Republicans in December, when he allowed them to pass a budget that required the Treasury to borrow billions more for additional spending without also raising the debt limit to accommodate the billions in over-spending they voted for:

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