From Pine View Farm

The Duplicity of the Hostage-Takers 2

In the Roanoke Times, Andy Schmookler points out the hypocrisy of the Republican stance on the debt ceiling.

In a news conference on Dec.13, House Speaker John Boehner insisted that the Republicans in Congress would insist on holding onto their ability to compel the U.S. to default on its credit, saying that Congress would never give up its “power of the purse.”

But the legitimate congressional powers of the purse are about spending, and this has nothing to do with that. The debt ceiling isn’t about spending. The money has already been spent. This is about paying one’s bills.

Paying one’s bills is what responsible people — and governments – do. The power that Boehner wants — and that the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is now also threatening to use – is the power to make the United States an irresponsible country.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    January 13, 2013 at 3:24 pm

    Kind of remarkable to see that in a Virginia newspaper. It’s gotten so bad. Which kind of goes back to my line that our system only works under the assumption that a governing party would not actually wish to destroy it. One hopes the President knows what he’s doing because there’s no procedure book on how to handle people who are crazy and nihilists. Wait, who was crazy and nihilistic in the last twelve years? Oh yeah, the guy we killed in Pakistan. 

     
  2. Frank

    January 13, 2013 at 3:59 pm

    The Roanoke Times is actually a fairly decent rag.  The truly loony big paper in Virginia is the Richmond Trash Disgrace Times Dispatch. My local rag (TM) is normally quite sane.

     

    The Roanoke Times columnist that I criticized earlier was a guest columnist, not a staffer, and, although I disagreed with his premise, his conclusions were nowhere nearly so loony as the stuff Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, and David “I’m a moderate, really I am” Brooks push several times a week every week.

     
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