Backtracking, FAST

I’d like to pause for a moment and point out how totally wrong I was have already managed to be about the debt ceiling. When I claimed that House Reps’ breaking the Hastert Rule twice in two months was extremely unlikely, I hadn’t counted on their breaking it twice in two weeks. When I was in DC a few weeks ago, Sen. McCain was talking about what I think was the Senate version of that bill. He kept going on about trees and how the government doesn’t need to buy new ones. He might just have been killing time until Obama and the House and Senate leaderships returned from a fiscal cliff meeting, but regardless, the objections didn’t sound like something anyone was going to rally around. I don’t know exactly what was in the House bill, but outside of ideological objections to the government’s buying and planting trees, nothing discussed while I was there for an hour and a half seemed objectionable.

I also assumed the Republicans had some of that legendary party discipline left over and that they, as a group, still had credibility about being insane. That no longer appears to be the case. If the Koch brothers, Republican legislators in both houses, and a group of economists that was convinced to say that Romney’s tax plan added up are all bailing on a plan, that plan must be so insane or so dangerous that it’s not worth it to find out what happens if you actually do it.

There are still sequestration and the budget in the month after the debt ceiling deadline, but it seems like both sides have given up on having a big fight about the debt ceiling. If I sound disappointed, it’s only because I don’t know yet what occasion hard money advocates or people confused about fiat money will have to make more graphics like this one in the coming fights:

(borrowed from The Daily Beast)

Yo, I Heard You Like Optimism

So Mike Konczal put some optimism in your strategic analysis of the debt ceiling.

The relevant image:

Noticeably absent from this table’s “negotiate” branch is “weak deal,” which past discussions suggest might include (the worst idea) gutting reforming social security and medicare with chained CPI or a change in the eligibility age.

Pruning the “negotiate” branch — that is, credibly committing to being insane — would have forced the tree down the “don’t negotiate” branch in a world in which House Republicans don’t want the platinum coin to happen. This could have been done through disconnecting the phones in the White House, announcing a vacation to Hawaii until Feb. 16, and launching a “Design the Platinum Coin” contest in the nation’s elementary schools similar to the one that was done for the state quarters.

It’s not that #mintthecoin is a good choice or good outcome, but it had to stay on the table to make pruning the “negotiate” branch credible. Obama has to believe that the House Republicans both hate the idea of default and take his cheap talk verbal commitment not to negotiate seriously, and he has no reason to believe either.