Reply #11: And what were the Democrats doing, anyway? [View All]

[gratuitous]

I worked for support enforcement many years ago, and I can't tell you how many discussions I had or heard with folks behind in their child support payments where their first topic was visitation, and how they hadn't seen their kids in months. Each time we had to patiently explain that we were talking about support payments here, not visitation. That was a wholly separate subject.

Similarly, the Democrats should have stayed on the debt ceiling, and the need to raise it to pay for expenditures already authorized and made. You want to talk cuts? All right, but at this time, we're talking about a routine matter of raising the debt limit, something both parties have done for decades. If spending is such an important issue, then let's take it up separately, and not try to forge some non-existent tie between future spending and present obligations.

We could have and should have fought these assholes sound bite for sound bite, with the added advantage of being correct. Instead, the Democrats allowed debt limits to be tied to future budgeting, a devil's bargain that serves no one, and that will be jettisoned the second the Republicans have accrued more power. At that time, Republicans will casually deny any connection between budgets and debt limits, and the Democrats won't be able to remember or make the public remember that the Republicans argued exactly the opposite back in 2011.