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In Washington, two of the biggest stories now are the impending showdown over the debt ceiling/spending and the Biden document controversy as a subset of the more significant Trump document legal peril.
What both stories have in common is the reality that Republicans are likely to lose these twin fights politically unless they demonstrate significantly more sophisticated tactics, a more thoughtful strategy, and a greater level of cohesion than history and recent levels of competency suggests they possess.
Writing about the first battle, the Wall Street Journal’s ed board cautions to the GOP actually apply in parallel to the second battle as well.
In other words, the words of warning Gigot & Co. have on the debt ceiling fight (Republicans need a vision for an endgame and thoughtful plan to get to their desired outcome) apply to the document dustup also:
The problem is that the House GOP faces an imbalance of political forces. Their majority is only five, which will shrink to four if Rep. George Santos is forced to resign. Democrats hold the Senate and the White House. All of Wall Street, bond investors, the credit-rating agencies and the financial world will be warning of debt-limit doom. The press will side as usual with the Democrats. Maintaining GOP unity as the political pressure builds will make the vote for Speaker look easy….
All of which means Republicans will have to pick their spending targets carefully, explain their goals in reasonable terms so they don’t look like they want a default, and then sell this to the public as a united team. The worst result would be for Republicans to talk tough for months, only to splinter in a rout at the end, and be forced to turn the House floor over to Democrats to raise the debt limit with nothing to show for it. Opportunists on the right would then cry “sellout,” even if they had insisted on demands that were unachievable.
This is what Democrats expect to happen, which is why they don’t think they need to negotiate. If Republicans want to use the debt limit as leverage, they need a strategy for how this showdown ends, not merely how it begins.
Does Kevin McCarthy have What It Takes to relentlessly maneuver through the thicket?
If he does, he will have to do it in tandem with his opposite and opposite number, Mitch McConnell.
The Washington Post’s essential reading piece on the 2Mcs is most notable for its Paul Ryan quotes and the kicker story from another former Republican speaker, which tells you almost all you need to know:
[John] Boehner quickly learned how to irritate his counterpart, after he ill-advisedly lectured the leader on what he thought was going on in his chamber. Boehner described McConnell reprimanding him with his “usual expressionless face.”
“John, I’ll never presume to know more about the House than you do,” Boehner recalled McConnell saying, before he walked away. “And trust me, you’ll never know as much about the Senate as I do.”
As I’ve written here before, Democrats are confident they can win this debt ceiling fight both politically and substantively, for several reasons:
1. They don’t think McCarthy can navigate the policy, press, and political challenges embedded in the battle.
2. History.
3. The media.
4. Market and business pressure.
5. The adults/accommodationists in the Senate.
Most of those dynamics will be at play in the document fight too, with Team Biden counting on getting its part of the story off of the metaphorical front pages as soon as this week – again, mostly relying on Republicans to mess things up.
But the White House knows it needs to do two (related) things to hasten putting the story in the deep freeze for a bit.
The Gang of 500, Democrats on Capitol Hill, and the media all abhor two things:
1. Incompetence.
2. The sound of “drip, drip, drip.”
So expect a lot of emphasis on talking points (“Republicans are playing politics” etc);“necessary” (and legally allowable) disclosures; and a tighter coordination of the Biden players to try to limit the capacity of the saga to be a daily story fueled by new revelations.
When/if that happens, the media will likely go back to explaining the clear difference between the Biden and Trump cases – and to the debt ceiling fight.
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ESSENTIAL READING
* Politico on the biggest 2024 question out there now: Can Ron DeSantis do the personal parts of running for president? The story leans two notches too much into “maybe” – as opposed to “the jury is out and has asked to have the entire trial transcript read back to them.”
* Two massive China stories:
Here’s the Wall Street Journal:
China’s Economic Growth Fell to Near-Historic Lows as Covid Took a Bite
The outlook for 2023 has been lifted by optimism around the easing of Covid restrictions
China’s population shrank last year for the first time since a devastating famine in the Mao era, in a clear sign that the country is facing a looming demographic crisis worsened by decades of coercive policy that limited most families to a single child.