Tuesday Reads

HENRI MATISSE -Les Pensées de Pascal,1924

Good Morning!!

I’m still trying to recover from Dakinikat’s post yesterday. She seems convinced that the Supreme Court will agree with the 5th Circuit that the way the Consumer Finance Protection bureau is financed is unconstitutional and their decision will lead to the downfall of the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, and other off-the-books programs. I’m not convinced it will happen, but I’m still extremely depressed by Dakinikat’s arguments.

But for today, I’m trying to set all that aside and just worry about what’s happening (or not happening) with the debt ceiling. Here’s the latest on that emergency.

This is an opinion piece by The Washington Post’s Katherine Rampell, who is very knowledgeable about economic issues: After breaking itself, Congress tries to break the rest of government, too.

The GOP House’s debt-limit-and-spending-cuts bill does a lot of things to sabotage the basic functions of government. It decimates spending on safety-net programs. It creates more red tape to block Americans from accessing services they’re legally eligible for. And it makes it harder for government to fund itself in the first place.

But perhaps the most destructive, least noticed part of the bill is a provision that would force virtually all federal regulatory machinery to grind to a halt.

Tucked into Republicans’ debt-limit-ransom bill is some legislative language that has been kicking around Capitol Hill for a while, known as the Reins Act. If enacted, the law would prevent “major” agency regulations — somewhere around 80 to 100 per year — from going into effect unless Congress first approves each and every one.

To be clear, under current law, Congress already has the ability to rescind regulations it dislikes. This new bill would essentially change the default, so that no major regulation could take effect before Congress gives its blessing.

This change might sound reasonable. After all, tons of American problems have been dumped at the feet of executive-branch agencies (guns, immigration, health costs, etc.). It would be great if federal lawmakers got more involved in trying to solve literally any of them.

But if you think about how Congress actually functions (or rather, doesn’t), you’ll realize this is not an earnest attempt to get lawmakers to roll up their sleeves and conquer the Big Issues. It’s about throwing sand in the gears of the executive branch, so that no one can solve any issue. Ever.

By Ernest Ange Duez

Rampell explains why the system is set up the way it is.

There are two main reasons Congress currently delegates certain regulatory issues to executive-branch agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

First, some policy questions aretechnically challenging. What amount of arsenic in the air is “safe”? What should bethe technical standards for mammography equipment? How should the Volcker Rule be implemented in practice? As talented and hard-working as congressional staff are, they might not have the time or expertise to make informed decisions about such minutiae. Agency scientists or other subject-matter experts are tapped to weigh evidence, solicit input from the public, hold hearings, etc., to execute the objectives Congress has enacted.

The second reason is political.

There are plenty of policy questions that Congress has technical capacity to resolve but might prefer not to. Maybe lawmakers can’t come to an agreement within their caucus. Maybe they know that whatever they choose to do will be unpopular.

So: They punt, and make it some other government functionary’s problem.

For example, Congress has been unable to pass significant immigration reform in more than three decades, leaving the executive branch to address migration-related problems in sometimes legally tenuous ways (see: the legal limbo ofso-called dreamers, or former president Donald Trump’s unfunded border wall). Congress has all but abdicated many of its basic responsibilities to other branches of government, such as passing a budget, setting tariffs or deciding on abortion rights.

Or, you know, making sure the federal government doesn’t default on its debt. Apparently even some Republicans are now rooting for President Biden to direct Treasury to mint a new $1 trillion platinum coin to pay off government expenses or adopt some other deus-ex-machination.

Biden and McCarthy are meeting again today. From The New York Times: Biden and McCarthy Set for More Talks as Debt Limit Deadline Nears.

The 3 p.m. meeting comes a day after Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen reiterated that the United States could run out of money to pay its bills by June 1 if Congress does not raise or suspend the debt limit.

Jean Metzinger (French, 1883–1956), Tea Time, woman with a spoon

Republicans have said they want to slash federal spending before lifting the debt ceiling. The president has maintained that raising the limit is a responsibility of Congress and should be done without conditions to avoid an economic disaster, even as he has said he is open to separate negotiations over spending.

Over the weekend, the White House projected cautious optimism regarding a potential agreement, but on Monday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy expressed doubts.

“I don’t think we’re in a good place,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I know we’re not.”

Some potential areas of compromise have emerged in recent days, however. Mr. McCarthy said on Monday that he wanted to negotiate some of the key provisions of the bill to raise the debt limit that House Republicans passed last month. Those include spending caps, permitting changes for domestic energy projects, work requirements for safety net programs like food stamps and clawing back unspent money allocated for pandemic relief programs. “All of that I felt would be very positive,” he said.

Most of the people on food stamps are children, so this would go along with the new Republican push to get rid of child labor laws.

In addition to Mr. McCarthy, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader; Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader; and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, will join Mr. Biden at the White House.

The government hit the $31.4 trillion debt limit on Jan. 19, and the Treasury Department has been using accounting maneuvers to keep paying its bills. Mr. Biden is also scheduled to leave for Japan on Wednesday to attend the Group of 7 meeting, heightening the sense of urgency to make progress on the debt limit….

“We welcome a bipartisan debate about our nation’s fiscal future,” Mr. Schumer said on Monday. “But we’ve made it plain to our Republican colleagues that default is not an option. Its consequences are too damaging, too severe. It must be taken off the table.”

Ms. Yellen will warn on Tuesday that the standoff over the debt limit is already having an impact on financial markets and is increasing the burden of debt on American taxpayers. Investors, she will note, have become wary of holding onto government debt that matures in early June — when the government could start running out of cash.

“We are already seeing the impacts of brinkmanship,” Ms. Yellen will say at the Independent Community Bankers of America summit, according to excerpts from her prepared remarks.

The Washington Post: Liberals grow fearful Biden may reward GOP for weaponizing debt ceiling.

The White House’s liberal allies are increasingly worried that negotiations with House Republicans over the budget risk rewarding the GOP for threatening the U.S. economy with default, even as Biden administration aides insist the talks have nothing to do with the looming debt ceiling deadline.

Tea Time, by Jacques Jourdan

Since last week, Biden aides have been in talks with staffers representing leaders in Congress about a deal to fund the federal government next year that would also raise the nation’s debt ceiling, which must be lifted by as soon as June 1 to avoid potential economic catastrophe. President Biden will host House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other top congressional leaders again on Tuesday for more discussions.

The fresh talks follow months in which Biden and his top aides insisted that the White House would not entertain making any trade-offs to raise the debt limit, saying that would set a dangerous precedent that encourages GOP brinkmanship. And yet, to some critics, the administration appears to be doing exactly that — following unrelenting pressure from the business community and even some moderate Democratic voices to enter bipartisan talks after the House passed a spending and debt limit bill last month.

Publicly, Biden administration officials are adamant that they are working with House Republicans on a deal to fund the federal government in the next fiscal year — not to raise the debt ceiling. Privately, however, even some Biden aides recognize that the negotiations appear to be in part about the debt limit. Behind the scenes, negotiators are clear that any deal on the budget must resolve the debt ceiling deadline, as well. Democratic negotiators also acknowledge that they will have to agree to more spending cuts if they want to secure a longer extension of the debt ceiling — an implicit recognition that lawmakers are bartering over the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, an approach Biden has repeatedly disavowed.

“The issue here is principle: If you accept the idea that you can, in essence, be held to blackmail with the debt ceiling, it will be done again and again. Not to be crass, but it’s essentially negotiating with terrorists who have taken hostages,” said Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a left-leaning think tank. “More and more people in progressive circles are becoming concerned with it.”

Of course most of the mainstream media is reporting on all this as if it’s a typical negotiation over a political dispute, and failing to point out that Congressed raised the debt limit with no fuss when Trump was in the White House.

Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine: The Media Is Normalizing Debt-Ceiling Extortion. No, this isn’t how Congress always does it. It’s different and dangerous.

Ten years ago, when Barack Obama faced down an attempt by House Republicans to extract concessions in return for lifting the debt ceiling, he explained that he saw this tactic as inimical to functioning self-government. “If we continue to set a precedent in which a president … is in a situation in which each time the United States is called upon to pay its bills, the other party can simply sit there and say, ‘Well, we’re not going to … pay the bills unless you give us … what we want,’ that changes the constitutional structure of this government entirely,” he explained….

But as the new Republican-led House seeks to renew the effort to use the debt ceiling as a hostage, a revisionist interpretation has taken hold: This isn’t a new or dangerous tactic, it’s just how Congress operates.

At the Tea Table” (Konstantin Korovin, 1888)

“The House Republicans’ insistence on negotiations and compromise is not hostage taking. It is the ordinary stuff of politics,” claims law professor Michael McConnell. “A standalone clean debt ceiling is dead on arrival … In modern times, the debt ceiling is raised with negotiations,” asserts Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman.

Andrew Prokop of Vox argues, “Historically, it hasn’t been the case that the debt ceiling is a sacrosanct thing that shouldn’t be subject to typical political horse-trading. In 2017, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer bragged to the New York Times that he had used the debt ceiling as ‘leverage’ over President Trump.”

This is all totally false. These arguments conflate negotiation, which is historically common in debt-ceiling bills, with extortion, which isn’t.

It is true that, historically, debt-ceiling bills have also been wrapped together with other measures. But what McCarthy is doing is not that. He is threatening to refuse to lift the debt ceiling unless President Biden grants him concessions. The parties are not engaged in “horse-trading,” because all the horses are being handed by one party to the other. They are only negotiating over the size and contours of the ransom payment.

This is neatly illustrated by the recent news that Democrats have met the Republican’s putative concern over deficits by proposing to include closing a handful of small tax loopholes, but Republicans have categorically ruled out any revenue increases in the bill. There is no mutual exchange of concessions, as past bills accompanying a debt-ceiling hike have featured.

The difference between an ordinary negotiation over the contours of a debt-ceiling increase and extortion is that the latter includes demands and threats. The demands are not proposals to combine policy one side prefers with policy the other side wants (i.e., we’ll fund my food stamp program in return for funding your farm subsidy program). A demand is an insistence on obtaining unreciprocated policy gains that the counterparty would otherwise oppose.

The threats are the mechanism for obtaining the demands: Specifically, the threat is to refuse to lift the debt ceiling unless concessions are given in return.

Read the rest at the NY Magazine link.

In other news, yesterday the Virginia office of Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly was attacked by a man armed with a baseball bat.

The New York Times: Staff Members Attacked With Bat at Congressman’s Virginia Office.

A man armed with a baseball bat and demanding to see Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, attacked and injured two staff aides in a rampage inside the congressman’s Fairfax, Va., office, the latest episode in a surge of political violence across the country.

Xuan Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax, was facing charges for one count of felony aggravated malicious wounding and one count of malicious wounding, according to the Fairfax City Police Department. He was being held without bond.

Police said they had not yet identified a motive, and Capitol Police said in a statement that the suspect was not known to them.

Sgt. Lisa Gardner, a spokeswoman for the Fairfax City Police, said at a news conference on Monday afternoon that the assailant walked into Mr. Connolly’s office after 10:30 a.m. with what appeared to be a metal baseball bat and struck two staff members in the upper body.

Both staff members were conscious when the police arrived about five minutes after a 911 call, she said. They were taken to and then released from the hospital, Mr. Connolly said.

“You could absolutely tell that the people inside were scared; they were hiding,” Sergeant Gardner said.

“It’s quite frankly scary that someone can walk up to an office with a baseball bat and just start swinging at innocent victims,” she added.

Tea in the Garden” (Ernest-Joseph Laurent, 1859-1929)

Here’s some information on Xuan Kha Tran Pham from the AP, via News10: Mentally ill man who attacked congressional staffers has violent history, police say.

A mentally ill man chased and threatened a woman with a metal baseball bat in a northern Virginia neighborhood before attacking U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly’s office, shattering windows and striking two women, including an intern on her first day on the job, authorities said.

Staffers then managed to shelter in an inner office until officers arrived, within five minutes. Connolly said they used a stun gun to subdue the man, identified as Xuan-Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax. He was held without bond at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center on charges of malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney pending his first appearance Tuesday.

Pham, 49, has been violent before, attacking police officers last year. His father, Hy Pham, told The Washington Post his son is schizophrenic and had dealt with mental illness since his late teens. He said he had been trying, without success, to arrange mental health care for his son. The father could not immediately be reached by The Associated Press….

“At this time, it is not clear what the suspect’s motivation may have been,” Capitol Police said in a statement announcing a joint investigation with Fairfax City Police.

Police said the man is suspected in a separate attack a short time earlier Monday.

Fairfax County Police said a man later identified as Pham approached a woman parked in her car about five miles (eight kilometers) away from Connolly’s office at 10:37 a.m. The man asked the woman if she was white, then hit her windshield with a bat and ran away, according to police.

A video recorded on a neighbor’s home camera system at the same site shows a man with a bat chasing a woman who can be heard screaming. Dan Ashley, the homeowner, said it was “troubling to see this sort of thing happening in the neighborhood.”

The video is on Twitter if you want to watch it. Just search for Xuan-Kha Tran Pham.

There was gun violence yesterday too–what else is new?

The New York Times: 3 People Killed and 6 Injured in New Mexico Shooting.

An 18-year-old gunman fired indiscriminately while roaming a residential street in Farmington, N.M., on Monday morning, killing three people before the police arrived and killed the suspect, the authorities said. Six other people, including two officers, were injured.

The authorities received several reports of shots fired near Dustin Avenue and Ute Street just before 11 a.m., Chief Steve Hebbe of the Farmington Police Department said in a video statement released on Monday night, adding that the rampage appeared to be “purely random.”

“Old Woman Pouring Tea” (Unknown artist, 19th century)

Chief Hebbe said that the gunman, whom he did not name, had used at least three different weapons, including an “AR-style rifle,” a gun commonly used in mass shootings, as he roamed through the neighborhood, randomly firing “at whatever entered his head to shoot at” including at least six houses and three cars.

Officers located the shooter in the 700 block of North Dustin Avenue, Chief Hebbe said, where they shot and killed him.

The two injured police officers — one from the Farmington Police Department, and a state police officer — were treated at the San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, the authorities said. The state police officer had been released by Monday night and the other officer was “doing well,” according to Chief Hebbe….

The conditions of the others who were injured were not immediately known, and the authorities did not release the names of any victims or the suspect.

The motive for the shooting remained unclear. In an earlier news conference, Deputy Chief Baric Crum said it was not immediately known whether the suspect had any criminal history or why he was in the neighborhood.

I guess we’ll learn more today.

One more from 5NBC Dallas-Ft. Worth: 12-Year-Old Charged With Murder, Accused of Killing Sonic Employee.

A 12-year-old and a 20-year-old are both facing a murder charge after a restaurant employee was gunned down during an altercation with a customer Saturday night in Keene.

Flowers and a cross now stand outside the Sonic Drive-In on Old Betsy Road in Keene. It’s a growing memorial to Matthew Davis, a 32-year-old employee and father who was shot and killed while on the job Saturday night.

According to a statement from Keene Police, the shooting happened at about 9:40 p.m. Angel Gomez, 20, went to the Sonic with several passengers and was acting “disorderly” in the parking lot when Davis confronted him for urinating in the parking lot, Keene Police Chief James Kidd said.

The confrontation turned physical and a 12-year-old who was in Gomez’s car pulled out an assault rifle and fired six rounds at Davis, Kidd said.

Davis was struck multiple times and was taken by an air ambulance to a nearby hospital, but he did not survive.

Gomez and the 12-year-old fled the area, but Gomez eventually returned to the scene and was taken into custody. Police tracked the 12-year-old to Rio Vista where he was arrested.

Unbelievable.

I think that’s about enough bad news for today. I’m sorry to be the bearer of so much horror. Please take care of yourselves today and if you find any good news, I hope you post it in the comment thread.