Score another one for Joe Biden
President Joe Biden tripped over an absurdly placed sandbag on Thursday, just as a lot of people would, and he recovered more quickly and easily from it than a lot of people half his age (including me) would have. Lost in the kerfuffle was the fact that it was Biden who sandbagged Kevin McCarthy.
Biden’s budget bill – let’s call it what it is, given that the “compromise” favored Biden by about a ten to one ratio – passed the Senate on Thursday night with votes to spare, after having passed the House with votes to spare. The budget is now a done deal, the threat of a default is officially off the table for at least a couple years, and Biden only had to give up very little to make it happen.
Of course Biden had all the cards going in. The House Republicans in toss up districts were always going to force McCarthy to cut a budget deal, because they feared what a default would do to their reelection prospects. McCarthy was always going to have to go along with their demands, because they had the votes to oust him. So there was never going to be a default. And because this scenario gave Biden most of the leverage, he was going to come away with most of what he wanted out of that deal. All that McCarthy was ever going to get was a sliver of face saving table scraps, which he’s now humiliatingly holding up for all to see while trying to declare victory.
This wasn’t going to go any differently. Given the math, Joe Biden would have needed to be fairly inept in order to lose this budget standoff, and fortunately he’s extremely savvy. Of course we tend to take competence for granted when it comes to Biden and the Democrats these days. Let’s remember that most of this latest crop of Republican leaders are completely incompetent when it comes to negotiating.
That’s because Trump-era Republicans no longer consider competence – even corrupt competence – to be a priority. Trump made McCarthy the Republican House leader precisely because he was too dumb to be a threat, and House Republicans ended up reluctantly making this idiot Speaker because they couldn’t find 218 votes for anyone else on their side of the aisle. Their ranks truly are that devoid of actual political talent. What the Republicans have forgotten over the past few years is that to succeed in any way in politics – even to succeed at pulling off corrupt schemes – you need to have political talent. This isn’t a reality show.
In any case, score another one for Joe Biden. He was always going to win this budget standoff, but only because he expertly knows how to play a good hand when he’s dealt one. For that matter Biden knows how to play a bad hand, as evidenced by the wide ranging infrastructure he and the Democratic leadership managed to pull off out of thin air last year, seemingly without even having the votes.
And yes, let’s take one final moment to remind ourselves that this budget standoff was never going to play out much differently than this. After the Senate vote last night, someone reminded me that I wrote all the way back in January that the budget standoff was going to end up being a non-story, and sure enough, it was. But I didn’t get this right because I’m some genius. Everyone else in the political journalism and analysis industry had to know all along that this story was going to play out like this, even as they were screaming “oh no we’re going to default” to try to gin up ratings. The next time they try to spin a non-story or sideshow into some doomsday storyline, let’s hold them accountable by letting them know that we’re not falling for it. And let’s go make sure we get Biden reelected. We need four more years of this guy savvily winning one hand after another like this.
