Turning Defiant Republicans into Lapdogs

A possible catastrophe bearing down on Washington helped circumvent another catastrophe, which has recently been threatening with the same predictable regularity as the groundhog that predicts how long winter weather will continue: Republicans decided that the threat of a Thursday blizzard was cause to call off the trench warfare they had planned to wage over raising the nation’s statutory debt ceiling.

On Tuesday, all Democratic representatives plus a handful of Republicans voted to increase the debt ceiling, currently at $17.2 trillion, until March 2015. On Wednesday, the Senate, with its Democratic majority, prevented what would have been a party-line Republican vote to oppose.

Compared with the uproar of last August, when a looming default threatened the world’s largest economy and was avoided just at the last minute, this decision was anticlimactic. Texas Senator Ted Cruz failed in his attempt to block the vote via filibuster.

The Object of Hatred: Obamacare

Ted Cruz and the tea party faction are on a fool’s errand. While they certainly have every right to attack America’s spendthrift economic policies, which began under George W. Bush, raising the debt limit doesn’t mean increasing the debt; it just means the U.S. intends to pay those debts it has already incurred.

And where did these debts come from? They came from the programs and laws this same Congress enacted in earlier months and years.

Not that the Republicans would ever admit it. If they abandon their strategy of blockading everything, they are doing so not because they have had a change of heart, but because they think that in an election year they can score more points attacking the Affordable Care Act and the general sluggishness of the American economy. That strategy promises to be more successful than the stubbornness of Ted Cruz.