Mitch McConnell’s big bluff
With much of the drama of the Trump administration now out of the picture, news networks seeing their ratings plummet are desperate to try and pick up the slack however they can. They’re either trying to revive Donald Trump somehow and make him out to be a serious threat that can pop back to life at any given moment, or they’re convincing us that the negotiations of President Biden’s legislation are on the verge of ruin, and making Mitch McConnell out to be an evil genius who can somehow still get his way on everything, despite the fact that he mostly holds a symbolic role in senate leadership.
In fact, part of Mitch McConnell’s power is derived from people who not only trust him to do the evil thing – but those who believe he is capable of getting whatever he wants by willing it into being. The key, however, is to not take McConnell at his word until the moment comes. As soon as Chuck Schumer proposed ending the filibuster on the debt limit, McConnell caved and caved big – rather than bringing about the economic ruin he could have by forcing the country to default on its debt.
While there’s talk of the Democrats blinking when having to choose between painful options in a major deal – we’re only beginning to see how badly the bluff was called on Republicans when it came to the debt ceiling. Not only did McConnell cave as he had to – but he provided Democrats with a road map for how to keep the same thing from happening again in December when it comes to government funding: leaving the determination to lift the debt ceiling up to the Secretary of the Treasury – and Nancy Pelosi made clear it was Mitch’s idea to do so at her press conference. Republicans have not only threatened to hold the economy ransom to block legislation that can improve countless lives, they’ve also failed at it pretty spectacularly. Let’s keep these losers out of power for the next decade.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making