Were Republicans Acting Like Extortionists?

Eugene Volokh argues no:

[W]hen we design institutions we might want to constrain some groups’ ability to get what they want by threatening to withhold their cooperation. Some might argue, for instance, that unions shouldn’t have various legal rights that make it easier for them to threaten strikes, and that employers should be freer to refuse to employ union members. Some might argue that various supermajority rules — whether the Senate filibuster, or even the possibility of divided government that stems from the separation of the executive and the legislative — give too many groups the ability to get too many concessions through threatening to withhold their cooperation. … But when people are exercising whatever existing legal and constitutional rights they have to withhold their cooperation, and to threaten to withhold their cooperation, I don’t think that labeling them “extortionists” or “hostage-takers” is a useful analogy. If you want people to work with you, to give you their votes, or to promise to pay for more debts, you may have to make concessions that you shouldn’t have to make when all you want is for people to leave you and your property alone.

So perhaps the troll vs hobbit debate is more appropriate? But the underlying point is that threatening the full faith and credit of the Treasury – something never done before – to maximize your own position, was indeed a new level of risk. Maybe a $14 trillion debt justifies it. But this was not business as usual or the conventional checks and balances. It was far more radical; and in the long run, impossible to say what consequences will follow: more fiscal responsibility or more political brinksmanship.