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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, October 8, 2021.

I am John Potor, it's the editor of commentary magazine inviting you to consider joining us on November 22nd for the 11th annual commentary roast our big benefit dinner to help keep the lights on and the podcast's coming and the magazine coming and the website coming for commentary, which is a nonprofit 501 C3 if you attend our roast, which is not a cheap ticket.

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With me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald hi Abe.

Hi John senior writer Christine Rosen high Christine hi John and associate editor Noah Rothman high Noah hi John.

So the budget cliff.

The possibility of the United States defaulting on its debt obligations has been pushed down the road a couple of months as a result of a compromise deal between the Democrats in the Senate and

the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and 10 other Republicans 11 out of the 50 Republicans agreeing to a deal that brought the that meant that this, this matter of raising the debt ceiling by specific amount of money so that it could go into December without us defaulting on our our obligations could pass through general

regular Senate order not be blocked by closure which requires 60 votes.

You know if you if you can't get 60 votes for something then the bill is frozen and they got 61.

And this is a very interesting and highly complicated matter as of course Mitch McConnell was saying we are not going to help you pass your giant bills by caving to your demand that the debt ceiling be raised right now to make it easy and he eventually said okay we'll give you another couple of months and then we're really not doing it again so you better

get everything together so that when you want to pass legislation if you can pass legislation you can add the debt ceiling to your reconciliation package which owing to the wildly complicated rules going on here can pass with only 51 votes being the 50 Democrats or the 4 to 8 Democrats into independence the caucus with the Democrats and vice president of

and then we will not participate in that budget busting socialistic process so you better get your extra and get all your ducks in a row.

So the general portrait of this both on the left and the right is that McConnell blinked McConnell caved and I'm just not entirely sure that's true what and I just want to read to you something from you,

from you, Volvin, our friend you, Volvin, a very brilliant, very dense piece in national review yesterday called the Democrats debt ceiling debacle and he lays out every reason that the Democrats are having trouble dealing with all of this and how they could have dealt with it differently and didn't but

he says here I think the deal happened because the Democrats turned out not to have 50 votes for any solution to the problem until the middle of this week Mitch McConnell was reasonably confident that by standing firm he could get them to just use the reconciliation process and it was only on Wednesday that he came to realize the chuck humor that's the Senate majority leader

simply didn't have the power over his conference to make that or any other way forward for the Democrats happen even if Schumer wanted to what happened here was not so much the Democrats hanging together as it was the Democrats failing to reach 50 on anything

and what you've all does earlier in the pieces of layout every possible scenario that could that they could have used short of meeting McConnell's or the Republicans votes so although there was certainly an element of McConnell blinking just as there was an element of Schumer doing so the reason McConnell blinked was not that the Democrats managed to behave like a majority party but that it became clear to McConnell that at this point there is no majority party in the Senate

there are 48 Democrats there are 50 Republicans and there are two Democrats at least among who are willing to stick their heads up and be these Democrats who are saying we don't like the direction you guys are trying to pull us in with trillions and trillions of dollars of spending that we don't agree with either practically or ideologically

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