As of this writing Friday morning, the media reports that there is no debt ceiling deal yet, but that the two sides—meaning Biden and Kevin McCarthy—are close. Strange how Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seems to be totally sidelined. Does the Senate not have any leverage at all? Apparently not. Biden’s regular weekend trip to his beach house in Delaware for his vitamin injections and blood transfusions or long sleeps in his vampire casket or whatever his handlers are doing to prop him up has annoyed many Hill Democrats who think he needs to stick around and finish a deal.
You can sense the resignation Democrats have about the scene from one headline earlier in the week in The New Republic:
The Democrats Have Already Lost the Debt Ceiling Fight
Six months ago, Democrats were riding high. They had just improbably overperformed in the midterm elections; if it wasn’t for the meltdown of New York’s Democratic Party, they likely would have held onto slim majorities in both chambers of Congress. . .
And so, the Democrats decided to press their advantage. Instead of raising the debt limit during the lame duck, when they still possessed a narrow advantage in both the House and the Senate, they made the strategic decision to do nothing. When the need to raise the debt limit approached in 2023, the thinking went, the Republicans now in control of the House would once again show their extremism, voters would recoil, and—voila—another Democratic masterstroke. . . But as the debt limit hurtles closer—the United States could default in less than two weeks—it looks more and more like a catastrophic miscalculation.
The real reason for the GOP advantage is that Biden, or his handlers, can read the polls. As we noted yesterday the public supports the Republican position on the issue. And here’s another set of poll numbers from CNN and AP showing the same thing:
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