Debt ceiling deal demonstrates that the centrists aren't dead yet

No one seems happy about the way the debt ceiling fiasco appears to be working out, save, perhaps those on the extreme fringes whose happiness is guided by their opportunities to profess unhappiness while standing in front of this camera lens or that.

The right is outraged that it didn’t get the draconian cuts it was after, and little in the way of policies that more or less would have required a poor person with two broken legs to work before receiving medical assistance.

The left is outraged that the administration didn’t more aggressively seek expansion of climate spending, and that the minuscule savings the bill does scrape from underneath the couch cushions is squeezed from the poverty stricken, not the yacht-sailing crowd that pays nowhere near their fair share of taxes, if they pay any at all.

The center is disgusted with the process as a whole, pointing out that the debt ceiling is an archaic relic meant to control the sale of war bonds in 1917. It was never envisioned as a tool of extortion through which a minority faction of government could hold a revolver to the head of the global economy.

So everyone pretty much believes we went through a tumultuous upheaval and came within a whisker of world calamity for nothing. But for the silver lining crowd, there are reasons to believe the exercise wasn’t entirely the, as Otter in "Animal House" put it, “really futile and stupid gesture on somebody’s part” that it appeared to be.

First, while it is certainly irritating that the Republican party that uttered nary a peep when Donald Trump was adding a historic $7.8 trillion to the national debt are now going around acting like excess spending will be the death of us all, the truth is that a little belt tightening after our pandemic-related spending bender is probably in order, even though in reality it’s not critical.

Fifty years ago, our parents were told that the federal debt would doom their grandchildren. (They were told the same thing about the trade deficit, which was a big deal for a few years and then forgotten.) Today those very same grandchildren, who seem to be doing just fine, are being told the same thing about their grandchildren. The debt is a fiscal Sasquatch that inspires great fear but never makes an appearance.

And with Congress divided as it is, the final product of debt ceiling negotiations is probably not any different than it would have been under “normal” budget negotiations.

Naturally, there was a lot of posturing, threats and line-drawing, and no one drew a harder line than one Joseph R. Biden, who said he would never, ever, ever negotiate on the debt ceiling, right up to the moment he began to negotiate on the debt ceiling. Well of course he did. Just as I suspect he would have employed one of the exotic congressional workarounds to avoid insolvency had negotiations failed.

But it was in everyone’s interest that negotiations not fail, most notably House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s, a man who had been largely emasculated by a humiliating House Speaker election process.

Republicans, Democrats, independents and political agnostics all need a functioning House of Representatives, and for that to materialize, its leader needed to be seen on a national stage, eyeball to eyeball with the president, negotiating a deal that was at least not a loss.

Biden, a product of Congress, probably wanted to elevate McCarthy, or at least the office of the Speaker. Going forward, McCarthy will be known not as the man who was dragged around by the ear by House extremists, but as the man who was able to work out a very difficult deal on a very contentious issue.

More than that, politics is about relationships, and the debt deal — while in itself a manufactured crisis — established working relationships among the president, the speaker and their staffs that will almost certainly pay dividends when sticky issues arise in the future, as they always do.

If nothing else, the debt ceiling negotiation was a dry run, a demonstration that government at our highest level can still function, even if it isn’t the prettiest thing to watch.

The House of Representatives has been portrayed as a basket case, too crazy and dysfunctional to accomplish, well, anything. But we now see that might have been a misrepresentation, the product of too much media attention devoted to the flame-throwers on the far right.

In the debt ceiling deal, Republicans and Democrats came together to avoid catastrophe. It may not have accomplished anything useful, but it did demonstrate that for all the noise coming out of the extreme-right Freedom Caucus, the centrists aren’t dead yet.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: McCarthy, Biden work out debt ceiling deal, show negotiation possible