Your 2023 Legislative Badass Is ... Not A Legislator, It's Joe Biden!
Congress barely legislated, but when it did, Joe won.
Picking a Legislative Badass for 2023 was a tough choice in a year when Congress did Jack Shit, over and over again. We could’ve gone with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who in the multiple failures by Republicans to choose a speaker kept getting more votes than any GOP candidate (but not a majority of total votes, since Goopers kept voting for protest candidates). But while Jeffries did a terrific job of keeping the Dem caucus unified, we decided to hand the Badass title to Biden, primarily for outmaneuvering Republicans in negotiations to extend the debt ceiling, winning a deal that avoided a world financial crash while also not conceding to GOP demands to undo Biden’s first-term legislative achievements.
Remember, extending the debt ceiling is usually a routine vote to allow the government to borrow money to pay for spending it’s already done. Defaulting on that debt wouldn’t make the debt disappear, it would throw the world economy into chaos and make the payments more costly, actually resulting in greater debt. But when Republicans hold one or the other house of Congress under a Democratic president, they use the periodic debt ceiling vote to try to force enormous budget cuts or the elimination of entire programs they don’t like, like Obamacare in 2013, or Biden’s climate policy this year.
Biden said from the start that he would be happy to negotiate with Congress about the budget when it took up spending bills, but that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy would need to pledge not to allow a default on the debt, period.
McCarthy then came back in April with a ransom note threatening to default on the debt, because his bosses in the GOP caucus were happy to play chicken with the economy anyway. Let’s just recall what the R’s demanded in exchange for not causing a global economic meltdown. Among other demands, the big ones were
A freeze of federal spending at 2022 levels.
Repeal of virtually all the climate provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Elimination of the IRA’s $80 billion funding increase for the Internal Revenue Service.
That last was needed to update the tax service’s antiquated computers and to hire staff not just to go after wealthy tax cheats, but also to have enough people to process returns and to work on the customer service lines, which prior to the new funding only answered 13 percent of taxpayer calls.
Biden, who had said from the start that he wouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, said hell no, and that only a “clean” debt limit bill would be acceptable. Once that was in place, sure, he’d negotiate on the budget process.
And what the hell: By the end of May, with the chicken-race getting awfully close to the cliff, McCarthy agreed to a deal that avoided default and which gave the rightwing loonies in the House virtually none of the concessions they’d demanded. It suspended the debt ceiling through January 1, 2025, taking that craziness off the table until after the presidential election, and capped non-defense spending at current levels through the end of fiscal 2024.
The biggest concessions allowed for some imposition of work requirements for food assistance, but expanded access to the benefits for many more people, so it was a tradeoff. And the GOP did get a $20 billion cut from the new IRS funding, but not full elimination of it, as they’d wanted. The climate provisions in the IRA were untouched, but to get Fucking Joe Manchin on board, the agreement allowed a gas pipeline from West Virginia to be built, bypassing the normal authorization process. Sucks, but the carbon reductions expected from preserving the rest of the climate package (roughly a billion metric tons by 2030) will vastly outweigh any new emissions from the pipeline (estimates from climate experts are disputed: from a low around 16 million metric tons annually, up to a high of 89 million), one of those “coulda been worse” compromises.
After the debt ceiling extension passed, MAGA Republicans showed their displeasure with McCarthy by killing several of their own awful bills, so there.
Biden also came out the winner in both of the Republicans’ subsequent attempts to shut down the government, getting short-term extensions of current spending, without massive cuts, from Kevin McCarthy, who lost his speakership for letting Democrats keep the government open, and from McCarthy’s eventual, far worse replacement, Mike Johnson. (The latter deal even extended the must-pass Farm Bill until September 30, 2024, putting off one budget fight thank Crom.)
Neither of those continuing resolutions included funding for Ukraine, because Republicans like Russia too much, but otherwise, the national parks remain open, federal workers are getting paid, and the economy keeps humming along, creating jobs and making Fox News angry.
So hell yes, Joe Biden out-legislated the actual legislators this year. Now the dipshits will try to impeach him without actually knowing what for, which will just be one of the many things making 2024 interesting.
Happy New Year, and we won’t see you til Tuesday, so there.
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Selfie with a new smile!
https://open.substack.com/pub/ziggywiggy/p/new-teeth-new-smile-new-me?r=2knfuc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Flying home from New Years. Total score on New Year’s Eve:
3 Bloody Marys
2 Sazeracs
2 shots of Fernet
1 shot absinthe
1 Ramos Gin Fizz
1 daquiri
1 shot of… something on Bourbon Street
My liver has filed an HR complaint.