Mr Khan said:
All politics on that end. In 2006, before the election, the Dems were still the double-minority, and had absolutely no incentive to vote to raise the debt ceiling or make it look like raising the ceiling was a good idea at the time. Which is the problem we're seeing with the Republicans right now. They're still acting like a double minority party, and not a responsible partner of governance which is what you have to be when you have divided government |
Which is kind of my point. It's not only Republicans who play politics with the raising of the debt ceiling, and contrary to what so many people keep saying, nothing about the present situation is unprecedented (except for the fact that we are dealing with trillions instead of billions now, of course) as the Democrats tried to put the screws to Eisenhower in almost the exact same way.
I suspect we could argue at great length over just who is behaving more irresponsibly here, but Harry Reid knew exactly what the next Congress would look like when he declined in November to take up the raising of the debt ceiling - which at the time was supposed to be reached in April. But he decided he wanted Republicans to own it, too, so he put it off, probably banking on the idea that these crazy freshmen didn't really believe what they were saying. Clearly, at least some of them do.
