Today on "Meet The Press," America's top accountant, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, clarified that the United States had actually reached its debt limit in May and has been employing 'extraordinary measures' to keep the country solvent for the past four months.
Savannah Guthrie, sitting in for David Gregory, threw hard questions like wrenches at Mr. Lew on the fact that the president will not negotiate with House Speaker John Boehner and Republicans at all on all on a budget that defunds or delays the Affordable Care Act. This has shutdown the government, now in its sixth day, and now this irresponsibility is quickly bleeding into the issue of raise the debt ceiling, which frankly shouldn't be an issue at all.
Mr. Lew didn't have an adequate answer for the question, except to say that Congress needs to do its job. He is correct on that, but it is not sufficient for many Americans who are opponents of Obamacare. To those people we'll provide this analogy: If instead the Republican House Members sent a spending bill to the Democratic-controlled Senate that stated the government would shutdown and we'd default on our debt if you did not defund Social Security, most everyone especially seniors would be outraged, yelling expletives at legislators. But Social Security isn't perfect, one could say and therefore has to be eliminated. To that, people would say 'just fix it then.' It's the same with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which has now been enacted (more on this in a minute).
What was equally disappointing is that Mr. Lew had no answer when it came to how crappy the roll out of the program has been with healthcare.gov being down for most all of this first week. Totally unacceptable. This is President Obama's legacy piece of legislation, we all know what date it starts, yet when it's time to hit the gas, the engine stalls out... wah wah.... How can a country with a computer spying agency like the NSA possibly not have the capability of creating the web site expecting a huge amount of traffic on a daily basis? Not good, and it certainly helps add fuel to the fire of Mr. Obama's opponents. At least during the roundtable, Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-OH) didn't spin the fact that it has been disappointing, to say the very least.
However...
As we've said before, the president should not negotiate on the Affordable Care Act. The genie is out of the bottle, the program is operational, no matter how bad a start, so at this point the Affordable Care Act is equal to Social Security. If Republicans want to cut spending that's fine, but they'll have to find other places from which to rid dollars, which Democrats have agreed to in the form of the sequester totaling $150 billion over ten years.
Republicans do know this, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) knows this, who also had difficulty answering Ms. Guthrie's direct questions. Mr. Paul is clever, especially when he explained that the budget is a series of appropriation bills and that Republicans are voting to pass all of them except for one. When phrased like that, it sounds reasonable, but that's not how it works, something the Senator also knows. Yes, the budget consists of a series of appropriation bills, but all of these bills have to be resolved in both Houses of Congress, hence they are passed all together as one. Cliche and true, you can not cherry pick which parts of the government you can fund based on one's personal taste, despite what The National Review's Rich Lowry would tell you.
Mr. Paul also said that the United States' credit was downgraded by Standard & Poor's because the country carries too much debt, which is not completely accurate. It had been assessed that yes, in fact, the U.S. does carry too much debt, but the reason for the downgrade was because of the unpredictability of the current Congress to responsibly continue to pay the bills.
Half way through the interview, Senator Paul stopped answering questions and just continually threw blame at President Obama and Senator Reid. There's plenty of blame to go around for this mess, but two things with that; 1, the American people have it right to put more of it on Republicans and 2, how disingenuous is it when you keep repeating the same answer on the program ("President Obama won't compromise.") immediately after your shown a video of yourself telling someone else to just keep repeating yourself? This appallingly illustrates your attitude toward to the intelligence quotient of the American people, who also have it right in not using a shutdown as a negotiating tactic, as Republican strategist Mike Murphy later pointed out.
Something like this prompts Ms. Guthrie to ask, "Do you have any idea how disgusted the American people are at these antics?"
Senator Ted Cruz obviously has no idea and/or simply doesn't care, whereas Senator Paul does but simply chooses to compartmentalize it. And as for Speaker John Boehner, he knows but is in denial. Mr. Boehner could bring a clean spending bill to the floor of the House without taking the Affordable Heathcare Act hostage and it would pass because of the silent majority of moderate Republicans, but he won't. And the reason is that Mr. Boehner knows if he sides with the moderates, he'll be run out of Washington like Newt Gingrich was in 1996, with the Tea Party leading the charge.
Then you read an article like this in today's New York Times that explains how this shutdown has been months in the planning by Conservative groups simply due to their hatred of the Affordable Care Act and are troubled:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/us/a-federal-budget-crisis-months-in-the-planning.html?hp&_r=0
As NPR's Steve Inskeep explained, Mr. Boehner and Republicans misjudged the Democrats, who are actually cting like Republicans in their show of unity, thinking that they would fold. Ultimately, Tea Party Republicans back by their donors (see above article link) who represent three percent of all Americans are going cause the country to go into seriously dangerous uncharted territory by potentially defaulting on our national debt.
Mr. Lew quoted Ronald Reagan in how bad it would be to default on our debt - 'impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate.' Clumsy as he did it, Mr. Lew clearly illustrated that it's been the consensus amongst politicians and business leaders for the last 30 years - that the United States should never even be this close to default. Is the United States really going to drop a potential economic nuclear bomb on itself? If John Boehner continues to let the Tea Party control the button, it could certainly happen.
Roundtable: Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Rep.
Marcia Fudge (D-OH); Republican strategist Mike Murphy; Host of NPR’s
Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep; and editor of the National Review, Rich
Lowry.
Note: We just want to acknowledge, as reported at the top of the program, that the United States, after a 15-year man hunt caught the mastermind of the the U.S. embassy bombing in Africa in 1998, - Anas Al-Liby in broad daylight in Tripoli, Libya - He was one of the Al Qaeda originals, with Bin Laden at the very beginning in the Sudan. The reports also illustrated how the United States' military presence in the continent of Africa is only going to increase.
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