The GOP appears to be committed to repeating past mistakes:
It would be, McConnell suggested, “irresponsible” to avoid a debt-ceiling crisis.
McConnell is hardly alone; many Republican lawmakers are making similar threats. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said over the weekend that the White House will have to give congressional Republicans something “impressive” in order to entice GOP officials to do their duty and avoid crashing the economy on purpose.
And what, pray tell, might this “impressive” gift be? What do Republicans want before they start hurting Americans on purpose? By all accounts, they’re still working on the ransom note in this latest hostage strategy, but they appear to have narrowed the list to the Keystone XL pipeline or eliminating “risk corridors” in the Affordable Care Act in the hopes that consumers will be forced to pay higher premiums.
Oy. Chait sighs:
A clean debt-ceiling bill can’t pass the House, you say? Then how come a clean debt-ceiling bill passed the House three months ago by a vote of 285–144? And how come, nine months before that, a clean debt-ceiling increase passed the House by the same margin? The Journal reports on the demands being hopefully floated by various Republican factions without mentioning at any point that the House did in fact raise the debt ceiling without policy concessions the last two times.
Yglesias piles on:
We have already seen this movie! Multiple times! The way it goes is that the clean debt limit “can’t pass the House” because of party cartel situations. Then Democrats argue, rightly, that it would be dangerous to allow the threat of economic chaos to be used as a lever of policy and they won’t back down. Then John Boehner admits he was bluffing and allows the clean debt limit to pass the House, with most Republicans voting no but a bipartisan majority in favor. We’ve seen it. Several times. The only thing possibly accomplished by doing this again is dealing some minor damage to the economy with unnecessary waiting and uncertainty.
The Dish 