Edward Luce: Game, Set and Almost Match to Joe Biden on the Debt Ceiling

Shakespeare foretold the tale of America’s latest debt-ceiling crisis — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The final deal, which will probably be passed this weekend, could also have been scripted by Joe Biden. Rarely in the history of fiscal brinkmanship has so much noise been made by so many Republicans with so little to show for it. The result is a win for Biden that prudence stops him from celebrating.

This charade’s key lesson is that people who call themselves ‘fiscal conservatives’ are guilty of fraudulent branding — aided by a process-obsessed media. The definition of fiscal conservatism is matching public spending with revenues over the business cycle. Threatening a catastrophic default unless the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service is defunded is its very opposite. That would be fiscal incontinence.

The fact that this was one of the key Republican demands gave the game away. https://www.ft.com/content/1934ea96-99c6-4043-9343-af0f1ff4c0ef

Susan B. Glasser The Irrational Exuberance of a Non-Catastrophe

Is there such a thing as a win-win in this zero-sum age of American politics, when Democrats speak of their Republican rivals as a threat to American democracy and Republicans speak of Democrats as a threat to America itself? During Memorial Day weekend, President Joe Biden cut a last-minute deal with the leader of the House Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to avert a catastrophic default on the national debt, agreeing to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025 and to institute around a hundred and eighty billion dollars in G.O.P.-demanded spending cuts over the next two years. On Wednesday, the deal cleared the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, and it appeared headed for Senate passage by Friday, two days before the date the Treasury said that it would run out of money.

Instead of the usual apocalyptic warnings, both Biden and McCarthy served up soothingly retro bromides about the virtues of coming together to do the people’s business. The President talked of the responsibility of governing and celebrated bipartisan compromise. The Speaker bragged of his accomplishment. Tonight we made history, he said, after the bill passed on Wednesday. I think we did pretty dang good for the American public. With disaster seemingly averted, and despite loud complaints from politicians on both the left and the right, an unaccustomed and distinctly upbeat tone crept into the political discourse: perhaps, after all, it was still possible to govern from the center and not the extremes. Was this, finally, the Revenge of the Normies?

The conventional wisdom on McCarthy was that, as Speaker, he was doomed to feckless subservience to the far right, whose votes had reluctantly put him in the chair only after fifteen ballots and a series of concessions that neutered his power. The new conventional wisdom is that McCarthy was underestimated and his Freedom Caucus foes have been, if not tamed, then at least temporarily beaten back. For Biden, whose case for the Presidency was premised on his ability to draw on decades of experience in the capital to broker old-fashioned deals across party lines, the political benefits were almost self-evident, all the more so since the alternative to a deal in this instance could well have been a recession-triggering economic crisis. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-irrational-exuberance-of-a-non-catastrophe

Molly Jong-Fast: The 2024 GOP Field Is Basically Donald Trump and His Mini-Mes

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman: In a deep red Florida county, a student-teacher revolt shames the right

By now, it’s obvious that the reactionary culture warriors who want to reshape American education are inspiring a serious liberal counter-mobilization in response. Remarkably, this backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum in some of the reddest parts of the country.

War on woke? one student said pointedly. More like war on your children’s future.

It’s me and my fellow students who are feeling the effects of this, said a second student. A third said the removal of books from classrooms is what’s really indoctrinating students.

Things like this are happening all over. As Sarah Jones of New York magazine reports, liberal parents in states as far-flung as New York, North Carolina and Montana are organizing local groups, pressuring school boards and running for office to challenge the right’s education takeover.

Democratic politicians are stepping up. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker will soon sign a bill that requires schools and libraries to adopt a prohibition on book removals for political reasons to qualify for state funding.

We have also learned that nine Democratic governors representing nearly 9 million students have sent a letter to leading textbook companies decrying the negative impact that censorship and book-banning has on this nation’s students. The letter indicates that the governors are watching closely to see if attacks on the companies by right-wing governors — such as DeSantis — are producing books that are inappropriately censored.

Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey and the head of the Democratic Governors Association, says these governors will be modeling an alternative to right-wing censorship going forward.

There’s a broad lane available for Democratic governors to reclaim the mantle of core American values — freedom, patriotism, rights, Murphy told us. Murphy recently responded to DeSantis’s restrictions on an Advanced Placement course on African American studies by expanding the number of such classes in his state.

Just as a car wreck commands attention, the ugliness of right-wing culture-warring often transfixes the news media. But another story is beckoning: Ordinary parents everywhere and their elected representatives are responding, and declaring that they’ve had enough. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/01/hernando-county-ron-desantis-book-bans-democratic-governors/

Tim Alberta: Inside The Meltdown at CNN

Dan Pfeiffer: Hey Media: Stop Grading Republicans on a Curve

Peggy Noonan: Trump, winning third nomination would mark the end of the GOP

If Trump Republicans propel Donald Trump over the top in the primaries, they will be doing and will have done two things. They will have made him their nominee for the presidency, and they will have ended the Republican Party.

I don’t mean this rhetorically, in the way of people walking around the past eight years crying, The party as I knew it is gone. I mean it literally: The GOP will disappear as a party. Meaning the primary national vehicle of conservative thought and policy will disappear.

But a third Trump nomination? The third time it breaks.

Put another way, once is what you did (made a mistake, as people and parties do). Twice is what you did (almost out of loyalty to the first mistake). But a third time—that isn’t what you did, it’s who you are.

There will be no Republican Party after a Trump ’24 race, which, again, means the vehicle of conservative thought and policy will be gone. https://www.wsj.com/articles/chris-christie-and-the-republican-partys-peril-new-jersey-2024-primary-trump-b0fa150d

Davids Ignatius: Biden is delivering on his most far-fetched pledge: Compromise

Jonathan Chait: The GOP’s Authoritarian Acceleration

During Trump’s first term, violations of democratic norms came in sudden dramatic bursts attracting wide news coverage, and these efforts were often undone by a lack of planning and haphazard execution. January 6 is the most vivid example. The episode dramatized Trump’s desire and determination to secure an unelected second term, but the coup attempt lacked the firepower to pull it off.

Since Trump left office, the Republican Party’s anti-democratic turn has accelerated, but it has taken place quietly and deliberately with little drama or media attention. It has had the benefit of planning and the formation of a partywide consensus. And it is more insidious than anything a reelected Trump could come up with in a fit of pique. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/gop-republican-party-fbi-authoritarian-acceleration.html

E.J. Dionne Jr.: The ‘Minnesota Miracle’ should serve as a model for Democrats

You could be forgiven for imagining that state legislatures around the country are lurching rightward, thanks to the media spotlight given to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture warring in his state. Other deep-red states are not far behind.

In Washington, President Biden was rightly seen as a net winner in the debt ceiling battle. But with the GOP in control of the House, it was largely a defensive triumph.

This is why the Minnesota Miracle, which is only beginning to get the attention it deserves, is so important. The avalanche of progressive legislation that the state’s two-vote Democratic majority in the Minnesota House and one-vote advantage in the state Senate have enacted this year is a wonder to behold.

To detail everything Gov. Tim Walz and his legislative partners accomplished would far outstrip the space allocated here. Minn Post reporters Peter Callaghan and Walker Orenstein offered a bracing race through the list:

“Democrats codified abortion rights, paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, drivers licenses for undocumented residents, restoration of voting rights for people when they are released from prison or jail, wider voting access, one-time rebates, a tax credit aimed at low-income parents with kids, and a $1 billion investment in affordable housing including for rental assistance.”

Take a breath and move on: “Also adopted were background checks for private gun transfers and a red-flag warning system to take guns from people deemed by a judge to be a threat to themselves or others. [Democratic] lawmakers banned conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, required a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, adopted a new reading curricula based on phonics, passed a massive $2.58 billion capital construction package and, at the insistence of Republicans, a $300 million emergency infusion of money to nursing homes.” The mix of tax cuts and increases, by the way, will make the state’s revenue system more progressive.

There’s a lot more, including laws strengthening workers’ rights and unemployment insurance for hourly workers previously left out of the system; a refundable child credit for lower-income Minnesotans; and free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota K-12 students. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/04/democratic-party-minnesota-legislature-progressives/

Dana Milbank: McCarthy got rolled. But it’s good for him — and America.

The MAGA Republicans’ opposition was categorical. It was also scatological.

Many of the same House GOP extremists who nearly denied Kevin McCarthy the speakership did their utmost this week to tank the bipartisan debt and budget agreement he struck with President Biden.

Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) wanted colleagues to know “what a turd-sandwich this ‘deal’ is.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (N.C.) told me and other reporters that the hard-liners needed “to fix this s--- sandwich.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.), at a news conference, declared it “crap.”

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) said she needed sides and a dessert in order “to eat [this] s--- sandwich.”

But this time, McCarthy didn’t cower and cave. He made these vulgarians clean their plates. He told the right-wing hooligans to stuff it, and he took his debt compromise to the House floor — where something remarkable happened Wednesday night.

More than two thirds of Republicans stuck with McCarthy, leaving the 71 GOP holdouts isolated. At the same time, nearly 80 percent of Democrats voted for the package, putting more D’s than R’s in the yes column and lifting the bill to passage by a lopsided 314-117.

Watching from the gallery, I felt more hopeful about our politics than I had in some time. For a brief, glorious (and probably fleeting) moment, the madness had stopped.

McCarthy discovered that, if he’s willing to be reasonable, Democrats will lend him their support. He also proved that the Trumpian forces within his party can be sidelined — if sensible Republicans would only show some courage. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/02/mccarthy-house-gop-defeat-trumpism-debt-ceiling-deal/

Bess Levin: The lawsuits against DeSantis’s “anti-woke” agenda are piling up, and Florida taxpayers are the ones paying the price.

In Ron DeSantis’s wars on free speech, the LGBTQ+ community, Black history, Black voters, pregnant people, and immigrants, the victims are clear. The other people being victimized by the laws being signed as part of the Florida governor’s absurd “war on woke”? Florida taxpayers, who are literally paying for the lawsuits that follow.

The Guardian reports that “lawsuits from various communities whose rights have been violated have been stacking up against” against DeSantis, and “residents [who] are already struggling with costs of living” are being forced to cover the tab. “The list of legal challenges precipitating from DeSantis’s unconstitutional laws is endless,” Democratic state senator Lori Berman told the outlet.

“We’ve seen Floridians rightly sue many if not all of the governor’s legislative priorities, including laws that restrict drag shows for kids, prohibit Chinese citizens from owning homes and land in Florida, suppress young and Black and brown voters, ban gender-affirming care and threaten supportive parents with state custody of their children, and of course, all the retaliatory legislation waged against Disney for coming out in support of the LGBTQ+ community,” she said. And fighting these suits—which falls to taxpayers—does not come cheap. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/ron-desantis-lawsuits-taxpayers