President Biden’s capacity to overperform after an onslaught of negative press and Democratic hand-wringing is second to none. He did it with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, NATO solidification and expansion, and now with the debt ceiling deal. It’s hard to conceive of an outcome more favorable to Biden.
Recall where this began: the Republican House Freedom Caucus making promises such as repealing much of the Inflation Reduction Act (including eliminating $80 billion in new funds for the Internal Revenue Service), capping nondefense spending at fiscal 2022 levels for a decade and blocking Biden’s $400 billion proposed student debt relief. None of that happened.
When factoring in agreed-upon appropriations adjustments, the deal holds nondefense spending essentially flat in fiscal 2024 and increases it by 1 percent in fiscal 2025. According to White House aides, that’s a better outcome than a straight continuing resolution.
As for blocking $80 billion in new IRS funding — an expenditure Republicans had basically characterized as helping enlist an army of jackbooted thugs to knock down your door — the deal would repurpose $10 billion from fiscal 2024 and another $10 billion from fiscal 2025 appropriations, to be used in nondefense areas (further lessening the blow to nondefense discretionary programs).
But the IRS reportedly will have discretion to shift spending in the funding’s 10-year window so that the deal has little near-term impact. A decade from now, the country will have a new president, a new Congress and almost certainly a new budget framework.
To sum up: Biden brushed back the litany of outrageous demands, kept his spending agenda and tax increases intact and got his two-year debt limit increase. And in making a deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Biden helps stoke dissension on the GOP side as the extreme MAGA wing denounces the agreement.
During the process, Democrats, as they frequently do, confused PR with substance. They fretted that McCarthy was getting more and better media coverage. They worried Biden was giving in to Freedom Caucus demands. Biden and his team understood something they did not: The momentary spin McCarthy produced is irrelevant. His right-wing crazies still hate the deal; Democrats still get the deal they wanted all along. Biden — like a prosecutor who lets his filings do the talking — lets his deals do the talking.
Moreover, Biden could not very well run to the press to tell them McCarthy wasn’t getting much of anything. The “play” here was to allow McCarthy to spin his way out of the corner that he and the Freedom Caucus had painted themselves into. Letting McCarthy boast that his great achievement was “getting Biden to negotiate” was a small price to pay for avoiding economic catastrophe and landing the best deal one could hope for in divided government.
The media coverage both during the process and after predictably took the frame of horse-race politics. Who won? Who lost? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden got a far better deal than the media expected or gave him credit for.
In underrating Biden’s accomplishments, the mainstream media is able to maintain the pretense of neutralism. And portraying McCarthy as a rational dealmaker feeds the fiction that the Republican Party is not controlled by MAGA radicals. (It very much is, which is why Democrats will need to get the bill over the finish line.) In this instance, at least, the media’s false balance probably makes it easier for McCarthy to sell his deal.
Democrats grouse that the upshot of all this means Republicans get to appear more rational and reasonable than they truly are. The only way to prevent that — in other words, to expose the full extent of Republicans recklessness — would have been to allow default (not acceptable) or refuse to make a deal, relying instead on either the procedural maneuver called a discharge petition, or invocation of the 14th Amendment to challenge the debt ceiling’s constitutionality.
A discharge petition — moving a bill out of committee and forcing a floor vote — might still be needed if McCarthy cannot get the bill to the floor, but the deal as it stands makes a discharge petition far more likely to succeed if it is needed. (A handful of Republicans could defend their gambit to get the bill to the floor by saying, Hey, Biden gave McCarthy what he needed!)
The 14th Amendment option is constitutionally sound, some scholars think, but the uncertainty created if it were invoked at this late stage would have been akin to an actual default — panicking markets, zapping the U.S. credit rating and spooking consumers.
A final, critical aspect of the deal: Biden concluded the deal over a holiday weekend, when members of Congress are away, media coverage is less intense and the public is paying little attention. That gave McCarthy every opportunity to get this done before a GOP backlash built — yet more evidence of the Biden team’s savviness.
And if, after all this, the deal still blows up, there will be no question that the MAGA extremists are out to wreck the economy.
