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Kevin’s Plan And The Faustian Bargain [1]

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Date: 2023-05-31

KEVIN’S PLAN AND THE FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

I live here in California, not all that far from Kevin McCarthy’s district. In fact I will be driving through it this weekend.

I write about politics and the environment on a couple of national blogs so I pay attention to the players and their tendencies. Kevin is not a complex man governed by conservative ideologues. He likes being a Congressman, it suits him. He gets afforded respect, tickets to the ballgames and a bunch of other perks regular folks don’t get.

He is not a smart man in the sense of being an intellectual, but he is politically savvy and knows a bit how things work around the Capital building.

An ideologue conservative would never have negotiated with Joe Biden, a Democratic President running for a second term with approval ratings in the low forties. This would not help your reputation in your own party now dominated by the most extreme faction cultivated under Donald Trump. When McCarthy ran for the position as Speaker of The House, he had to make some deals and promises he knew he couldn’t keep in order to secure the votes to be able to hold the gavel. I suspect he has no strong stance regarding the deficit one way or the other. It is, has always been, a policy ruse used by the Republicans going back to the FDR era when his social and economic policies kept them out of power for two decades. What Kevin cares most about is Kevin and keeping his current job. He also just might be cognizant of the fact that history would point to him as the villain in the collapse of the modern economy if America defaulted on its debt.

Being the leader of House of Representatives is not a secure job in the Republican Party in the era of the Freedom caucus and so Kevin McCarthy made a choice, it turned out to be the right one both for him and the country. He decided to enjoin the Democrats to help get a debt ceiling deal across the finish line and possibly save his job, at least until the next election. (He knows that Democrats will take back the House with Trump and the abortion on the ballot in 2024). Because of the Faustian bargaining necessary to get his position, it only requires one person to call for a vote to remove him. He is counting on Democrats when that day comes for the votes to save him. They may just do it depending on who the alternative might be. Just as with this bitter pill of swallowing this debt ceiling bill, Democrats understand that given two bad choices, one takes the lesser evil.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/31/2172558/-Kevin-s-Plan-And-The-Faustian-Bargain

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