Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boiler.

We're going to do something a little different this week, apart a bit from the typical one-on-one

conversation format we usually have, and stage something a little more like an argument.

So a few weeks ago, you probably remember President Biden cut a deal with Kevin McCarthy,

the House Speaker, to increase the national debt limit. Or to put it in more elucidating

terms, the deal diffused for the next couple years, the Republican Party threat to default

on the national debt, tank the national and possibly international economies, unless

Democrats give in to certain Republican policy demands. For the last 12 years, we've

called those concessions ransoms, because the demand is highly extortionate, cough up the

dough, or the economy gets it, and because, after the first time Republicans tried this,

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the debt limit, quote, a hostage-worth

ransoming. Okay, so they cut a deal. We did not default on our debt. The economy continues

to perform quite well, in fact. And with the crisis in the rear view, a consensus wisdom

has congealed in national politics that Biden essentially won the debt limit fight. Part

of it was that the White House mounted an unusually aggressive spin campaign to rest the

national discourse away from the idea that he'd paid Republicans these ransoms, and

Senate Moron, the idea that he'd once again proved that bipartisanship could work. Another

part of it was that the most right-wing House Republicans were just ripshit mad that McCarthy

didn't hold out for more concessions. Mostly, though, I think it was that many liberals

were basically relieved that Biden got Republicans to increase the debt limit without surrendering

too much in the way of policy. The conceit that held the liberal coalition together was that

the deal Biden agreed to was basically no different than the one he would have had to negotiate

...