Stark Choices: Compromise or Default?

24 July 2011 |permalink | email article

Just nine days before the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the debt ceiling the Party of No remains incapable of saying Yes.  Speaker John Boehner, unable to control his caucus, retreated from the so-called “grand bargain” with President Obama. He’s come up with a two-step debt ceiling “framework” favored by Republicans to influence the Asian financial markets hours before they open on Monday. He and his tea-party default caucus want a short-term increase with spending cuts now, DOA with the president and Democrats.

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader, accused Republicans of refusing to give ground on how the federal debt limit would be raised. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, on both FOX and ABC, said that unless progress was made by Sunday afternoon the danger of shaking world markets would increase. 

Compromise was the compelling theme on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” most elegantly poised by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. But last week 20 Senate and House tea party zealots crowded a Senate TV studio to issue a threat – either meet their demands, or they would force the United States to default. The only way out was for the Senate to pass, and the president to sign, their plan to permanently cap spending at levels not seen since 1966.

CBS News’ Nancy Cordes last week asked Boehner whether he had told the naysayers that any deal is going to involve some compromise. “I have,” the speaker said. “How?” Cordes asked Boehner who ignored her and solicited another question. His reply was that a House majority was not possible. That remained his caucus position Sunday and the threat of a GOP deficit reduction package Sunday afternoon – “Our way or the highway.”

A Pew Research Poll last week found that 53 percent of Republicans, and 65 percent of the Tea Party faithful, believe that the Aug. 2 default can be ignored without major problems. Given this disorder one is compelled to ask whether, in the dark night of the nation’s political soul and its leaders, it is still possible to snatch victory from the jaws of financial catastrophe.

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