The Ultimate Example

I still believe that eventually President Biden, Speaker
Pelosi, and Majority Leader Schumer will do the right thing.

The Wall Street Journal opinion page sheds a little more light on the process of budget reconciliation . [bold added]

The parliamentarian has already said that Democrats can use reconciliation to raise the debt limit, so why won’t they do it? As it happens, Mr. Biden gave that game away when he was asked Monday why Democrats aren’t using reconciliation.

“There is a process” that “would require literally up to hundreds of votes,” Mr. Biden explained. “It’s unlimited number of votes having nothing directly to do with the debt limit; it could be everything from Ethiopia to anything else that has nothing to do with the debt limit. And it’s fraught with all kinds of potential danger for a miscalculation, and it would have to happen twice.”

In other words, Mr. Biden admits that Democrats could raise the limit via reconciliation, but then they’d also have to take difficult votes on many issues on the Senate floor. Some of those votes might be unpopular. Mr. Biden is admitting that the reason is political—that Democrats want Republicans to spare them from having to take those tough votes.

Republicans have been hinting (actually some have been shouting) that President Biden is out-of-touch and even senile. From the above quote he doesn't sound senile to me. His handlers should let him speak more--I like this truthful Joe.

But back to the issue at hand: the editorial does communicate more information about Democrats and Republicans' respective motivations and the what of budget reconciliation ("difficult votes on many issues"). Just why these votes have to be taken through this still-mystifying procedure is not something that has been explained clearly to John or Jane Q. Public.

It's often been lamented that nothing works in Washington, and if these inside-the-Beltway rules crash the U.S. dollar and the world's financial system, the American people will view this as the ultimate example of dysfunctional government.

If you thought Donald Trump was bad, wait till you see what comes next.