House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been strutting his stuff for two weeks since wheedling his slim majority of House Republicans to (barely) pass a bill to raise the debt limit, supposedly strengthening his hand for negotiations with President Biden and Senate Democrats to avoid a first-ever default.
McCarthy should relish his victory march for now. Because that strut is about to become a slog. At stake is the job he fought so hard, and sold his soul, to get.
McCarthy’s predicament is that the handcuffs that House Republicans have put on him will make it almost impossible for him to sign off on a compromise.
Remember, first, that all the struggling underway is simply to get enough Republicans to help avert an economic catastrophe — by raising the debt limit so the nation can keep paying for past spending that presidents and Congresses of both parties racked up for years. In other words, to get Republicans to take an action that should be bipartisan. And nonnegotiable, as Biden says. When Trump was president, Republicans joined Democrats three times to hike the debt limit without drama.
The House passed McCarthy’s debt ceiling bill last month only after he spent days kowtowing to the demands of the most radicalized Republican caucus in history, whose far-right members are the real powers in Kevin’s House.