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MAY 30, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

You Go to War (or Not) With the President You Have

The debt ceiling idiocy tells us a lot about Joe Biden's strengths and
limitations.

Like the world according to T.S. Eliot, it ended with a whimper. Which
is about the best progressives could have hoped for, given
Republicans' control of the House and the president's limited
ability to transcend that unfortunate state of affairs with some
powerful messaging.

This is not a president who does-who can do-powerful messaging.

Joe Biden's strengths and weaknesses are those of a workhorse senator.
He can deal. He can keep lines of communication open to his fellow pols.
He can't use the powers of speech to reframe a debate or lift it to a
higher level where his position becomes the obvious solution.

Had he been so able, he might have gone on television to tell the nation
why the very existence of the debt ceiling was an affront to both the
Constitution and the nation's standing. He would have laid out the
reasons why he was inviting the Court to rule on it.

But in his 50 years in the public eye, Biden has never delivered a
speech with the power to alter the public's understanding of a major
issue. That wasn't really a problem when he was a senator or even a
vice president. It is, however, a genuinely limiting factor on his de
facto powers as president.

Speeches matter. In elevating the purpose of the war the North was
waging, the Gettysburg Address justified the unprecedented casualties
its soldiers were taking to a grieving and shell-shocked nation. Lyndon
Johnson was never able to deliver such a speech during the Vietnam War
(justifying that war was beyond all rhetorical powers), but even LBJ,
who was anything but silver-tongued, delivered one great speech, which
spurred the enactment of the Voting Rights Act.

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But speeches can be overvalued, too. Barack Obama's presidency
received more praise than it probably merited, in part because he was so
eloquent a speaker for morally necessary causes. But the deal that Biden
salvaged from the debt ceiling negotiations was so superior to that
which Obama hobbled away with from his own negotiations in 2011 that it
makes clear there's more to a presidency than speechifying.

Once the Republicans resolved to inflict the debt ceiling hostage-taking
upon us, it was a given that Biden would go through with the requisite
haggling. Reframing the question by challenging its constitutionality or
minting a gazillion-dollar platinum coin would have required the kind of
redefinitional sales job that Biden's aides, and perhaps Biden
himself, knew he couldn't pull off.

What he can enter into (a lot better than Donald Trump ever could) is
the art of the deal. The concessions that Biden made are not only much
less damaging than those of the 2011 arrangement-which ensured that
the recovery from the 2008 crash would take a full decade-but might
provide some political advantages in battles yet to come. Consider, for
instance, one of the deal's most egregious provisions, which my
colleague David Dayen has termed the Pipeline Payoff. By ensuring that
Joe Manchin's pet pipeline is completed, now magically empowered to
leap all remaining judicial and agency reviews in a single bound, Biden
strengthens Manchin's prospects for re-election next year, which the
Democrats need if they're to retain control of the Senate. He also
lessens the prospect that Manchin will wage an independent presidential
candidacy on the No Labels line, which would almost surely boost
Republicans' chances to win that election. For that matter, he makes
it harder for No Labels to pretend that he's a dangerous leftist who
must be replaced. And, of course, he avoids the biggest obstacle to his
own re-election, which was the economic implosion that would have
followed a default, remote though the chance of an actual default
actually was.

This is not to say that Biden's deal making didn't come with a cost.
From my perspective, its greatest cost was the omission of any
permitting deal that would have sped the construction of electric
transmission lines, absent which it could be a very long time before
wind and solar power can light up distant cities and farms. That task
now falls to a better Congress than the one we have now.

He can't speak but he can deal. As presidents go, we've done better,
and we've done lots, LOTS worse.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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The Auto-CR Dilemma
<[link removed]>
Today's X-Date: If the debt ceiling deal passes, the military budget
goes up and IRS funding gets slashed. But if Congress doesn't pass the
subsequent spending bills, that reverses. BY DAVID DAYEN

What's the Refugee Endgame for Latin America?
<[link removed]>
The Biden administration is trying to bottle up migrants south of the
border. It isn't working. BY JAROD FACUNDO

The Real 'Remain in Mexico' Begins at the Border
<[link removed]>
The likely consequences of Biden's new immigration policy will be
misery for thousands seeking refuge. BY LILLIAN PERLMUTTER

A China Reset? <[link removed]>
It's already happening-mostly to the advantage of Beijing. BY ROBERT
KUTTNER

Stirrings of a Conservative Christian Rule of Law
<[link removed]>
The court case involving the FDA approval of mifepristone revealed a
little too much about the conservative movement's aims. BY MARC
SPINDELMAN

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