A Prospect newsletter about the debt limit
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Savvy Beltway Reporters' Debt Ceiling Duplicity
Today on X-Date: Axios, CNBC, and Punchbowl News work to normalize
Republican legislative terrorism.
Â
Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images
By Ryan Cooper
**** Many years ago, journalism professor Jay Rosen usefully
named the "savvy school" of political journalism. "Savviness is that
quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic,
'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political," he wrote
<[link removed]>.
This school of reporters think it is "better to be savvy than it is to
be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere,
thoughtful or humane."
The savvy style is alive and well when it comes to Washington coverage
of the debt ceiling. At Axios, Hans Nichols wrote an article
<[link removed]> premised
on the idea that
**of course** Democrats and Republicans are going to have to compromise,
but lamenting that "both sides appear comfortable shaving it close." On
CNBC, Joe Kernen recently interviewed
<[link removed]> Punchbowl
News's Jake Sherman. "It's not true that there were three clean
raises under Trump," Kernen claimed. Sherman agreed, pointing to the
2011 debt ceiling increase. "In modern times, the debt ceiling is raised
with negotiations."
This is bad reporting and bad for the country.
There are two big problems here. First and most obviously is factual
inaccuracy. While it is technically true that debt ceiling increases
have commonly been packaged with other legislation, and this was the
case under Trump, in none of them have Democrats taken the ceiling
hostage in the way that Republicans are doing today.
As we have pointed out over and over again
<[link removed]>,
Republicans are making aggressive, hyper-ideological demands to harm the
country if they don't get their ransom, despite holding just one
branch of Congress-sweeping spending cuts, work requirements for
Medicaid, repeal of the core of President Biden's climate bill, and
more. In 2019
<[link removed]>,
by contrast, House Democrats conducted ordinary budget negotiations in
which both sides got a little something they wanted, and then threw in a
debt ceiling increase because it would be needed anyway.
For the situations to actually be comparable, Democrats would have had
to make similarly extreme demands-say, Medicare for All, repeal of the
Trump tax cuts, free postal banking, and a pony for every child under
11-with the explicit threat that otherwise the global economy gets it.
**Read all of our debt ceiling coverage here**
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The reason the only example that Sherman cites is the 2011 increase is
because that is the only time in American history the ceiling has been
raised through that kind of extortion process. President Obama indulged
Republican hostage-taking hoping to get a "grand bargain" to cut the
deficit-but it was such a disaster that the next time it came up in
2013, he refused to negotiate and successfully stared them down
<[link removed]>.
That is actually the most recent example of this kind of debt ceiling
fight in "modern times," and Sherman just ignores it completely.
Second, savvy reporting influences the outcome of the situation it
purports to describe neutrally. The cynical, knowing pose signals to
readers and watchers that reporters have the inside track about what's
going to happen, but writing articles or going on television to make
confident predictions often makes that prediction more likely to happen.
This is especially true when Democrats are in power. As a rule, the
party is gutless and easily cowed, and terrified of negative news
coverage. Sure enough, reporting indicates that Biden administration
officials are anxiously wringing their hands
<[link removed]>
about using any of the executive branch tools to do an end run around
the ceiling, like the platinum coin or declaring it unconstitutional,
because there might be negative consequences. (The negative consequence
of re-establishing the norm that Republicans can extract poisonous
concessions by threatening default, thus guaranteeing they will ask for
even more next time, doesn't seem to bother them as much.) CNN reports
<[link removed]>
that Biden himself is worried about invoking the 14th Amendment because
it might take too long to litigate.
If reporters like Sherman, Nichols, and Kernen were calling Republican
extortion what it is, instead of predicting that Biden would have to
give in to it, the administration would unquestionably be less
defensive.
Now, as my colleague David Dayen previously wrote
<[link removed]>,
Obama shares a lot of the blame for this situation. What is considered
"savvy" is heavily influenced by how the parties behave, and his
disastrous 2011 precedent established that both sides accepted taking
the debt ceiling hostage as legitimate, at least for a moment. By the
same token, there's no reason whatsoever for the Biden administration
to listen to savvy journalists.
But that's no excuse for political reporters to mislead their
audiences on recent history, nor to de facto collaborate with Republican
legislative hostage-taking.
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