Tonight the House passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling for two years, enabling the Treasury to borrow money to prevent a default. More Democrats than Republicans rallied to the measure, with 165 Democrats and 149 Republicans voting in favor, for a final vote of 314 to 117. Seventy-one Republicans and 46 Democrats opposed the bill. Now the measure heads to the Senate.
Joyce Vance said tonight that in light of the news today, she's gone from "if" the fat old traitor is indicted to "when" he's indicted. And the only thing better than that will be "when" he's stuffed into the 8x10 windowless cell on the third sub-basement level of the Florence SuperMax.
I just want him gone: a fatal hamberder, a smack on the noggin from a golf ball, or death from old age, ignored and forgotten in his 8X10 cell. Make America Truly Great Again with the fat old traitor six feet under.
I’d like to (unfortunately) comment on Trump’s anti-immigration ideology as a component of your post tonight. I simply do not understand his irrational fears of other peoples (ie not White Supremacists). It is apparent to any rational citizen that this nation was born of immigrants and indigenous peoples who were removed by genocide for the most part; with very few remaining. The histories of so many can be evaluated now with Ancestry.com and their DNA database in addition to family trees, stories, and the like. And we are finally appreciating the contributions of Black slaves whose manual labor was essential to the development of this great nation. History is being revisited as well it should be. Those immigrants coming from our Southern borders are desperately seeking asylum; I am not familiar with the numbers but I remember well Trump’s categorizing them as criminals and drug mules (which in some part is true, again the numbers are unknown to me but the Fentanyl crisis is real and needs to be addressed asap) but turning away vast numbers of desperate people seems cruel and inhumane. Overpopulation and the Climate Crisis have contributed in large measure. Just reading daily about the boats that never reach our shores or the hungry needing to get to family within our country is heartbreaking; I understand a safety net big enough for all would be massive but many of these people work as domestics or in fields gathering crops and do manual labor “above” the status of so many who criticize. I anticipate this issue being the largest in the coming election 2024 as it has hounded administrations for so many years already leading to the disastrous taking of babies from their families. Trump’s last fiasco building a wall that Mexico would pay for has remained clearly in my memory as remnants of it fall in areas & are repaired. It is not a solution. Growing antisemitism is a part of the same issue; we must never forget the Holocaust and deny entry to Jews seeking safety as we did for much too long as WW2 raged and we limited the intake of these people because we did not believe the enormous power of the Nazi regime. This critical issue is paramount to all Democracies and other governments in the world as the population explodes, water covers arable land, food sources are lost. A plan for addressing immigration may differ from state to state but humanity must be preserved. Trump may be indicted and gone; we all wish it to be. Nevertheless, it behooves all citizens to be engaged in solutions to this massive issue as it will only get worse with time. And there is Desantis; please 🙏🏻 give us six more years of Biden to give focus on this issue.
Quoting Wiki: "Born and raised in Kallstadt, Kingdom of Bavaria, Frederick Trump immigrated to the United States in 1885. In 1891, he began speculating in real estate in Seattle. During the Klondike Gold Rush, he moved to the Yukon and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse."
Well, that puts Trump's grandfather behind my immigrant grandfathers, who came to Amerika in the very early 1800s. I love the brothel bit - how like a Trump.
Some great points made in this newsletter. What stood out for me in all of it is increase in aid to children aging out of foster care. When I have asked what the anti-abortionists do to support the children in foster care - how many have they adopted, put through college, been involved with insuring the safety of these children, been advocates for these children in the courts, their knowledge of the number who turn to drugs and prostitution once they are aged out, I'm told I'm using red herrings. They stick their heads in the sands of denial. It sickens me. Also, today I read that the birth numbers of babies born in the U.S. is 3,000 less than last year. It is on the decline. I gave a silent fist pump.
More and more reasons not to allow the failed ex-president any audience. For certain this old fat fool is totally a waste of good air. Now, about the debt ceiling, every year or so this issue comes up and is used by politicians as a lever to force the government to go in the direction they want. Has happened before, will happen again. Is there not a Constitutional means for solving this uncertainty? The 14th Amend. keeps getting mentioned. Would not the US government and the US citizenry benefit if this fiasco were once and for all taken out of the hands of any self-serving bunch of legislators?
Something has been bugging me about this whole debt deal. We're so focused on the Reckless Repub Ransom that no one is pointing out how even the expectation we inch closer to their Putrid Policy Prefs is so illogical on an elementary level.
Yeah, they eked out a House majority and we have to deal with them. Them's the breaks. We all know they want to cut spending and Democrats don't. That's not a new dynamic. But why do people keep thinking of the compromise position between the two as a *relatively smaller* cut? Treating that as the meeting-halfway point assumes the Dem platform stands for maintenence of the status quo. It very much does not. The Dem platform is INCREASED spending on child care, elder care, a public ACA option, paid family and medical leave, education from pre-K to college, affordable housing, climate resiliency, and more, all MORE THAN FULLY PAID FOR by hiking taxes on the obscenely wealthy and the corporations they dwell in. The opposition party's desire is the mirror image of this. Therefore, it is the status quo that is, in fact, the compromise position between the two sides. If a glass is half full and I want it filled up but you want it emptied, the meeting-halfway point is... a half-full glass. The status quo.
So, yucky as it may be in so many ways, I am happy to see the status quo - or something quite close - selected as the compromise position here. Considering who we are dealing with, the fact a deal that actually passes this kindergarten logic test was reached can be viewed as yet another victory for the Biden admin, and our sanity.
How long will it take to get from indictment to treason and a revocation of Donald's citizenship (and his immediate family, excluding his neice Mary Trump), confiscation of all his properties and business interests and expulsion from all US lands. How long ??? I'm old and the last 7 years of that sabotage of my country have been awful. I want this finished before the 2024 election.
As an expatriate American who gave up my US citizenship for tax reasons, and complete abhorrence of the MAGA right in the US, perhaps many Americans don’t know that Americans or children of Americans living OS, even if not born in the USA, are still required to file income tax returns annually, and often have no access to their social security funds if they didn’t work long enough in the USA. I had to pay capital gains tax to the US when I sold my home in another country!🤬. I notice that neither Trump or Biden are one bit interested in the taxation of foreign dwelling or accidental Americans . So there is a lot of unfairness all around in the US citizenship game.
I just received an email from one of my senators, Jeff Merkley, saying he can’t vote for the bill because it gives Mountain Valley Pipeline unprecedented benefits to bypass environmental regulations and move judicial review to another circuit that presumably will be more receptive. This is the first I’ve heard any of this and what I was able to find indicates this is a maneuver to placate Joe Manchin. I realize this may be outside your area but if you have any knowledge of it, I’d like to know what you think.
The Republican Party, known for contributing to climate change by spewing extraordinary amounts of hot air, faces the looming possibility of nominating a former president for re-election while he faces a range of serious felony charges. It's unlikely he will face trial before the 2024 election. But during the campaign, will the GOP simply remain silent about the indictments? Will GOP voters who aren't MAGA true believers sit out the election? How much more over-the top crazy will Trump become knowing that justice is finally coming? Will a GOP wipeout finally kill the party? Nothing is certain, but justice seems finally headed Trump's way.
McCarthy may be saying that his position as Speaker is secure, but I'd guess that Chip Roy is just one of several HFC folks who are imagining themselves at this very moment taking up the Speaker's gavel.
President Biden delivered a Master Class in the art of political negotiation as he confronted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy over the debt limitation crisis. It is clear that the president understood implicitly the weak hand that Speaker McCarthy was dealt, and he used McCarthy's weakened position as Speaker to press his administration's advantage to its fullest. He knows that McCarthy is the prisoner of the crazies — the Far Right 'Freedom Caucus', as they like to style themselves; and with the president's initial bargaining position that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, the Hard Right leapt at the opportunity to maximize their demands that essentially doubled down on their nihilism. President Biden knows that this extreme contingent actually represents perhaps only a quarter of the 215-member Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, and that the rest of them basically go along because it is the path of least resistance.
On the other hand, the president knew that the threat of leaving the debt ceiling unresolved would mean that the United States Government will go into financial default, with serious consequences for the American economy that would be unsustainable. He also knew that the majority of Republican representatives were terrified that they would be blamed for the default, and rightly so. They were being held hostage is much as the Democrats were by the crazies. Speaker McCarthy was trapped between a rock and a hard place because he owed his job to the crazies; but at the same time the crazies were taking the country over a cliff. Even the crazies understood that this was all for show, and that they would have to give some serious concessions to the president if they expected to be reelected next year.
President Biden also had two other arrows in his quiver, the constitutional commandment embodied in Section 4 of the 14th amendment stating that the public debt of the United States of America "shall not be questioned", plus the maneuverings of House Democrats in crafting what is known as a Discharge Petition that would allow the debt ceiling legislation to be raised, or even eliminated, without the Speaker's approval, and all that would take would be a majority of the members of the House of Representatives, which basically meant that only five Republicans needed to defy their leadership and vote with all of the Democrats in order to put the legislation up for a vote before the entire House. If it looked as if the crisis were to go beyond the Treasury Department's deadline, which could occur any time between June 2 and 15, there were bound to be at least five Republicans who would be willing to jump ship and vote with the Democrats, regardless of whether they were likely to be challenged in their district's primary election in 2024.
Getting five Republicans, perhaps more, to switch their votes might not of been as hard as one might think. No one was asking them to change their party allegiance or their basic political philosophies of a thoughtful conservatism; instead, their Democratic colleagues would ask them to consider the fate of their country first, and to put our country first. This is something our soldiers and sailors routinely do, with no thought of their own safety, or the likelihood that they would not survive. For decades after the end of World War II, we youngsters were told of the self-sacrificing actions of what were known as the Four Chaplains, who gave their lives willingly in the rescue of civilian and military personnel aboard an American troopship, the SS Dorchester, that was torpedoed and sank on February 3, 1943 off the coast of Newfoundland, in the North Atlantic. The four men, all Army 1st lieutenants, included Methodist minister George L Fox; Catholic priest John P Washington; Jewish rabbi Alexander D. Goode; and Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling. They all met together at the Army Chaplains School at Harvard University, where they prepared for their assignments in the European theater of operations. As a group they received orders to sail aboard the Dorchester for passage to England; as a group, they declined to be placed into lifeboats and they gave their inflatable life vests away to others when supplies ran out. As anonymous they were in life, in death they became famous as a group for their heroic self-sacrifice when they could easily have saved themselves. In fact, a commemorative postage stamp memorializing their heroism was issued by the United States government, emphasizing their religious diversity, and their willingness to die on behalf of their countrymen. Standing alongside the story of the Four Chaplains, the craven selfishness and careerism of the Republican Conference makes a mockery of the oaths of office that each of them took "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same." Had a moment of decision come within the House of Representatives for Democrats to urge individual Republican colleagues to reconsider their party's position, it is possible, even likely, that some member of the House would remember the story of the Four Chaplains in the ensuing debate. The fact of the Dorchester's sinking, and the compelling true story of those four men's deaths might just have been enough to overcome the ambivalence that many of the House Republicans were undoubtedly feeling during the course of this political battle. Moral courage is exceedingly rare, but when circumstances require, some will step forward, and I am confident that more than a few would have summoned the courage to stare down the crazies, and thereby save our country from an ignominious default.
President Biden had been talking about a constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the debt ceiling law for the past several weeks, with prominent law professors stating that in their opinion, the debt ceiling law was unconstitutional, not only because the Constitution contradicted the debt limitation statute both directly and implicitly, but that the logic of passing legislation and incurring obligations in accordance with the laws thereby enacted commanding that money be spent for particular purposes would seem to favor the president's position from the language of the laws themselves, and the Constitution when read together. Of course the matter would be litigated before the courts, but that would take time, and even a conservative court grounded in its present membership would have a hard time saying that the Constitution didn't really mean what the words actually say. Anyone with a brain can understand the logic of following through to complete a task once started, and that trust in social, legal and commercial relationships must be maintained.
That has been the Supreme Court's problem with recent decisions that overturn strong precedents almost wholesale. As a political matter, the prestige of the Supreme Court has declined to a point that the court has not experienced since the 1930s, and the radical positions taken by its present conservative majority are highly unpopular. That unpopularity has been exacerbated by what appeared to be a complete absence of ethical standards on the part of Republican-appointed judges on that court, with the consequence that in the next election, voters who feel aggrieved by the court's decisions would likely be voting for congressional Democrats instead of Republicans. People need and want stability and predictability in their lives, not chaos.
In the meantime, the American economy would be frozen; the government would be unable to pay its bills; and the financial markets would go into chaos, with nobody able to say where things would end up. That worst-case scenario would be laid at the feet of the Republican Party; and many members of the Republican Caucus were viewing this as a suicide pact that they wanted no part of. With a five-member majority, Kevin McCarthy could not afford to roll the dice. The president was using the debt ceiling statute as a weapon against House Republicans, and in the long run he and the Democrats held the winning hand. The president was playing the long game that would maximize his advantage during the next election year when the new president would be chosen, and of the Republicans drove the country into a recession, their potential electoral losses loomed large. From a probabilistic standpoint, the position taken by the House Republicans was highly risky, and it had too many moving parts to make it work for them. For a party that made his bones peddling fear, they themselves found themselves in the grip of absolute terror of what might happen if they fail to cut a deal with President Biden. Only a distinct minority of the Republican contingent was willing to make that bet, and undoubtedly, many of the remainder had only to look back at what occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 during the course of that presidential election, ending up with the accession of Barack Obama to the presidency. As this past evening's vote by the House of Representatives to accept the deal that President Biden negotiated, Democratic members of the House largely held together, with perhaps 35 of them voting to reject the deal. As I recall from the news reports, something like 75 of the Republicans also voted to reject the deal; and of those voting against the measure, the vast majority of them were from the Freedom Caucus crazy house. Once again, the Republican Party managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They simply cannot help themselves.
Joyce Vance said tonight that in light of the news today, she's gone from "if" the fat old traitor is indicted to "when" he's indicted. And the only thing better than that will be "when" he's stuffed into the 8x10 windowless cell on the third sub-basement level of the Florence SuperMax.
I just want him gone: a fatal hamberder, a smack on the noggin from a golf ball, or death from old age, ignored and forgotten in his 8X10 cell. Make America Truly Great Again with the fat old traitor six feet under.
Does TFG insist that both parents be US citizens for the baby to be a US citizen? If so, Baron, Ivanka, Don or Eric would not be US citizens. Karma.
As for TFG discussing at least one classified document with non-authorized people, what penalty should he face for that?
Just asking…..(attempting Carlson questioning face)
The king’s ransom that you mention was paid by the Saudi government to the boy wonder Jared to the tune of 2 billion
I’d like to (unfortunately) comment on Trump’s anti-immigration ideology as a component of your post tonight. I simply do not understand his irrational fears of other peoples (ie not White Supremacists). It is apparent to any rational citizen that this nation was born of immigrants and indigenous peoples who were removed by genocide for the most part; with very few remaining. The histories of so many can be evaluated now with Ancestry.com and their DNA database in addition to family trees, stories, and the like. And we are finally appreciating the contributions of Black slaves whose manual labor was essential to the development of this great nation. History is being revisited as well it should be. Those immigrants coming from our Southern borders are desperately seeking asylum; I am not familiar with the numbers but I remember well Trump’s categorizing them as criminals and drug mules (which in some part is true, again the numbers are unknown to me but the Fentanyl crisis is real and needs to be addressed asap) but turning away vast numbers of desperate people seems cruel and inhumane. Overpopulation and the Climate Crisis have contributed in large measure. Just reading daily about the boats that never reach our shores or the hungry needing to get to family within our country is heartbreaking; I understand a safety net big enough for all would be massive but many of these people work as domestics or in fields gathering crops and do manual labor “above” the status of so many who criticize. I anticipate this issue being the largest in the coming election 2024 as it has hounded administrations for so many years already leading to the disastrous taking of babies from their families. Trump’s last fiasco building a wall that Mexico would pay for has remained clearly in my memory as remnants of it fall in areas & are repaired. It is not a solution. Growing antisemitism is a part of the same issue; we must never forget the Holocaust and deny entry to Jews seeking safety as we did for much too long as WW2 raged and we limited the intake of these people because we did not believe the enormous power of the Nazi regime. This critical issue is paramount to all Democracies and other governments in the world as the population explodes, water covers arable land, food sources are lost. A plan for addressing immigration may differ from state to state but humanity must be preserved. Trump may be indicted and gone; we all wish it to be. Nevertheless, it behooves all citizens to be engaged in solutions to this massive issue as it will only get worse with time. And there is Desantis; please 🙏🏻 give us six more years of Biden to give focus on this issue.
Written several years ago...
*
He has divided
his country
He has divided
brother against sister
sister against sister
son against father
husband against wife
*
That's how it is
and no one's safe
as long as he walks free
*
A time bomb
strapped to the back of the nation
Quoting Wiki: "Born and raised in Kallstadt, Kingdom of Bavaria, Frederick Trump immigrated to the United States in 1885. In 1891, he began speculating in real estate in Seattle. During the Klondike Gold Rush, he moved to the Yukon and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse."
Well, that puts Trump's grandfather behind my immigrant grandfathers, who came to Amerika in the very early 1800s. I love the brothel bit - how like a Trump.
Some great points made in this newsletter. What stood out for me in all of it is increase in aid to children aging out of foster care. When I have asked what the anti-abortionists do to support the children in foster care - how many have they adopted, put through college, been involved with insuring the safety of these children, been advocates for these children in the courts, their knowledge of the number who turn to drugs and prostitution once they are aged out, I'm told I'm using red herrings. They stick their heads in the sands of denial. It sickens me. Also, today I read that the birth numbers of babies born in the U.S. is 3,000 less than last year. It is on the decline. I gave a silent fist pump.
More and more reasons not to allow the failed ex-president any audience. For certain this old fat fool is totally a waste of good air. Now, about the debt ceiling, every year or so this issue comes up and is used by politicians as a lever to force the government to go in the direction they want. Has happened before, will happen again. Is there not a Constitutional means for solving this uncertainty? The 14th Amend. keeps getting mentioned. Would not the US government and the US citizenry benefit if this fiasco were once and for all taken out of the hands of any self-serving bunch of legislators?
Something has been bugging me about this whole debt deal. We're so focused on the Reckless Repub Ransom that no one is pointing out how even the expectation we inch closer to their Putrid Policy Prefs is so illogical on an elementary level.
Yeah, they eked out a House majority and we have to deal with them. Them's the breaks. We all know they want to cut spending and Democrats don't. That's not a new dynamic. But why do people keep thinking of the compromise position between the two as a *relatively smaller* cut? Treating that as the meeting-halfway point assumes the Dem platform stands for maintenence of the status quo. It very much does not. The Dem platform is INCREASED spending on child care, elder care, a public ACA option, paid family and medical leave, education from pre-K to college, affordable housing, climate resiliency, and more, all MORE THAN FULLY PAID FOR by hiking taxes on the obscenely wealthy and the corporations they dwell in. The opposition party's desire is the mirror image of this. Therefore, it is the status quo that is, in fact, the compromise position between the two sides. If a glass is half full and I want it filled up but you want it emptied, the meeting-halfway point is... a half-full glass. The status quo.
So, yucky as it may be in so many ways, I am happy to see the status quo - or something quite close - selected as the compromise position here. Considering who we are dealing with, the fact a deal that actually passes this kindergarten logic test was reached can be viewed as yet another victory for the Biden admin, and our sanity.
P.S. I appreciated this explainer from Vox today, so passing it along: https://www.vox.com/policy/23742237/debt-ceiling-deal-explained-student-loans-snap-irs
We have to keep fighting for democracy. The GOP knows it can't win elections nor allow the rule of law to persevere.
How long will it take to get from indictment to treason and a revocation of Donald's citizenship (and his immediate family, excluding his neice Mary Trump), confiscation of all his properties and business interests and expulsion from all US lands. How long ??? I'm old and the last 7 years of that sabotage of my country have been awful. I want this finished before the 2024 election.
As an expatriate American who gave up my US citizenship for tax reasons, and complete abhorrence of the MAGA right in the US, perhaps many Americans don’t know that Americans or children of Americans living OS, even if not born in the USA, are still required to file income tax returns annually, and often have no access to their social security funds if they didn’t work long enough in the USA. I had to pay capital gains tax to the US when I sold my home in another country!🤬. I notice that neither Trump or Biden are one bit interested in the taxation of foreign dwelling or accidental Americans . So there is a lot of unfairness all around in the US citizenship game.
I just received an email from one of my senators, Jeff Merkley, saying he can’t vote for the bill because it gives Mountain Valley Pipeline unprecedented benefits to bypass environmental regulations and move judicial review to another circuit that presumably will be more receptive. This is the first I’ve heard any of this and what I was able to find indicates this is a maneuver to placate Joe Manchin. I realize this may be outside your area but if you have any knowledge of it, I’d like to know what you think.
The Republican Party, known for contributing to climate change by spewing extraordinary amounts of hot air, faces the looming possibility of nominating a former president for re-election while he faces a range of serious felony charges. It's unlikely he will face trial before the 2024 election. But during the campaign, will the GOP simply remain silent about the indictments? Will GOP voters who aren't MAGA true believers sit out the election? How much more over-the top crazy will Trump become knowing that justice is finally coming? Will a GOP wipeout finally kill the party? Nothing is certain, but justice seems finally headed Trump's way.
McCarthy may be saying that his position as Speaker is secure, but I'd guess that Chip Roy is just one of several HFC folks who are imagining themselves at this very moment taking up the Speaker's gavel.
President Biden delivered a Master Class in the art of political negotiation as he confronted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy over the debt limitation crisis. It is clear that the president understood implicitly the weak hand that Speaker McCarthy was dealt, and he used McCarthy's weakened position as Speaker to press his administration's advantage to its fullest. He knows that McCarthy is the prisoner of the crazies — the Far Right 'Freedom Caucus', as they like to style themselves; and with the president's initial bargaining position that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, the Hard Right leapt at the opportunity to maximize their demands that essentially doubled down on their nihilism. President Biden knows that this extreme contingent actually represents perhaps only a quarter of the 215-member Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, and that the rest of them basically go along because it is the path of least resistance.
On the other hand, the president knew that the threat of leaving the debt ceiling unresolved would mean that the United States Government will go into financial default, with serious consequences for the American economy that would be unsustainable. He also knew that the majority of Republican representatives were terrified that they would be blamed for the default, and rightly so. They were being held hostage is much as the Democrats were by the crazies. Speaker McCarthy was trapped between a rock and a hard place because he owed his job to the crazies; but at the same time the crazies were taking the country over a cliff. Even the crazies understood that this was all for show, and that they would have to give some serious concessions to the president if they expected to be reelected next year.
President Biden also had two other arrows in his quiver, the constitutional commandment embodied in Section 4 of the 14th amendment stating that the public debt of the United States of America "shall not be questioned", plus the maneuverings of House Democrats in crafting what is known as a Discharge Petition that would allow the debt ceiling legislation to be raised, or even eliminated, without the Speaker's approval, and all that would take would be a majority of the members of the House of Representatives, which basically meant that only five Republicans needed to defy their leadership and vote with all of the Democrats in order to put the legislation up for a vote before the entire House. If it looked as if the crisis were to go beyond the Treasury Department's deadline, which could occur any time between June 2 and 15, there were bound to be at least five Republicans who would be willing to jump ship and vote with the Democrats, regardless of whether they were likely to be challenged in their district's primary election in 2024.
Getting five Republicans, perhaps more, to switch their votes might not of been as hard as one might think. No one was asking them to change their party allegiance or their basic political philosophies of a thoughtful conservatism; instead, their Democratic colleagues would ask them to consider the fate of their country first, and to put our country first. This is something our soldiers and sailors routinely do, with no thought of their own safety, or the likelihood that they would not survive. For decades after the end of World War II, we youngsters were told of the self-sacrificing actions of what were known as the Four Chaplains, who gave their lives willingly in the rescue of civilian and military personnel aboard an American troopship, the SS Dorchester, that was torpedoed and sank on February 3, 1943 off the coast of Newfoundland, in the North Atlantic. The four men, all Army 1st lieutenants, included Methodist minister George L Fox; Catholic priest John P Washington; Jewish rabbi Alexander D. Goode; and Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling. They all met together at the Army Chaplains School at Harvard University, where they prepared for their assignments in the European theater of operations. As a group they received orders to sail aboard the Dorchester for passage to England; as a group, they declined to be placed into lifeboats and they gave their inflatable life vests away to others when supplies ran out. As anonymous they were in life, in death they became famous as a group for their heroic self-sacrifice when they could easily have saved themselves. In fact, a commemorative postage stamp memorializing their heroism was issued by the United States government, emphasizing their religious diversity, and their willingness to die on behalf of their countrymen. Standing alongside the story of the Four Chaplains, the craven selfishness and careerism of the Republican Conference makes a mockery of the oaths of office that each of them took "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same." Had a moment of decision come within the House of Representatives for Democrats to urge individual Republican colleagues to reconsider their party's position, it is possible, even likely, that some member of the House would remember the story of the Four Chaplains in the ensuing debate. The fact of the Dorchester's sinking, and the compelling true story of those four men's deaths might just have been enough to overcome the ambivalence that many of the House Republicans were undoubtedly feeling during the course of this political battle. Moral courage is exceedingly rare, but when circumstances require, some will step forward, and I am confident that more than a few would have summoned the courage to stare down the crazies, and thereby save our country from an ignominious default.
President Biden had been talking about a constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the debt ceiling law for the past several weeks, with prominent law professors stating that in their opinion, the debt ceiling law was unconstitutional, not only because the Constitution contradicted the debt limitation statute both directly and implicitly, but that the logic of passing legislation and incurring obligations in accordance with the laws thereby enacted commanding that money be spent for particular purposes would seem to favor the president's position from the language of the laws themselves, and the Constitution when read together. Of course the matter would be litigated before the courts, but that would take time, and even a conservative court grounded in its present membership would have a hard time saying that the Constitution didn't really mean what the words actually say. Anyone with a brain can understand the logic of following through to complete a task once started, and that trust in social, legal and commercial relationships must be maintained.
That has been the Supreme Court's problem with recent decisions that overturn strong precedents almost wholesale. As a political matter, the prestige of the Supreme Court has declined to a point that the court has not experienced since the 1930s, and the radical positions taken by its present conservative majority are highly unpopular. That unpopularity has been exacerbated by what appeared to be a complete absence of ethical standards on the part of Republican-appointed judges on that court, with the consequence that in the next election, voters who feel aggrieved by the court's decisions would likely be voting for congressional Democrats instead of Republicans. People need and want stability and predictability in their lives, not chaos.
In the meantime, the American economy would be frozen; the government would be unable to pay its bills; and the financial markets would go into chaos, with nobody able to say where things would end up. That worst-case scenario would be laid at the feet of the Republican Party; and many members of the Republican Caucus were viewing this as a suicide pact that they wanted no part of. With a five-member majority, Kevin McCarthy could not afford to roll the dice. The president was using the debt ceiling statute as a weapon against House Republicans, and in the long run he and the Democrats held the winning hand. The president was playing the long game that would maximize his advantage during the next election year when the new president would be chosen, and of the Republicans drove the country into a recession, their potential electoral losses loomed large. From a probabilistic standpoint, the position taken by the House Republicans was highly risky, and it had too many moving parts to make it work for them. For a party that made his bones peddling fear, they themselves found themselves in the grip of absolute terror of what might happen if they fail to cut a deal with President Biden. Only a distinct minority of the Republican contingent was willing to make that bet, and undoubtedly, many of the remainder had only to look back at what occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 during the course of that presidential election, ending up with the accession of Barack Obama to the presidency. As this past evening's vote by the House of Representatives to accept the deal that President Biden negotiated, Democratic members of the House largely held together, with perhaps 35 of them voting to reject the deal. As I recall from the news reports, something like 75 of the Republicans also voted to reject the deal; and of those voting against the measure, the vast majority of them were from the Freedom Caucus crazy house. Once again, the Republican Party managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They simply cannot help themselves.