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  • Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

    Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

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    The speaker made a last-minute reversal to avert a government shutdown. It could cost him his job.

    Anna Moneymaker / Getty

    Updated at 9:02 p.m. ET on September 30, 2023

    For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.

    Read: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open

    With just hours to go, however, the speaker abruptly changed course, defying his conservative tormentors and partnering with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The House this afternoon overwhelmingly approved a temporary extension of federal funding. The Senate passed the bill in the evening, putting off a shutdown for at least 45 days and buying both parties more time to negotiate spending for the next fiscal year.

    The question now is whether McCarthy’s pivot will end his nine-month tenure as speaker. By folding—for now—on the shutdown fight, he is effectively daring Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and other hard-line Republicans to make good on their threats to depose him. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters before the vote. “But I think this country is too important.”

    The stopgap bill includes disaster-relief money sought by both parties, but McCarthy refused to add $6 billion in Ukraine aid that the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority of senators wanted. The Senate had been on the verge of passing its own extension that included the Ukraine money, but after the House vote it was expected to accept McCarthy’s proposal instead. Whether House Republicans agree to include Ukraine assistance in the next major spending bill is unclear, but Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are likely to make an aggressive push for it.

    McCarthy’s surprising about-face set off a wild few hours in the Capitol. Democrats were caught off guard and stalled for time to read the new bill, unsure if Republicans were trying to sneak conservative policy priorities into the legislation without anyone noticing. (In the end, only a single Democrat voted against it.) Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a second-term Democrat, caused the evacuation of an entire House office building when he pulled a fire alarm just before the vote, in what Republicans said was a deliberate—and possibly criminal—effort to delay the proceedings. (Bowman’s chief of staff said that the representative “did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote. The Congressman regrets any confusion.”)

    Annie Lowrey: How to end government shutdowns, forever

    On the right, the criticism of McCarthy was predictable and immediate. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” one of his Republican opponents, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted after the vote, seemingly rhetorically. Yet to more moderate Republicans, the speaker’s decision was a long time coming. McCarthy’s months-long kowtowing to the right had frustrated more pragmatic and politically vulnerable House Republicans, a few of whom threatened to join Democratic efforts to avert, or end, a shutdown. But many Republicans are even more furious at Gaetz and his allies. “Why live in fear of these guys? If they want to have the fight, have the fight,” former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate who served in the House with McCarthy for 12 years, told me. “I don’t understand why you would appease people who are doing nothing but trying to hurt and humiliate you.”

    This morning, the speaker finally came to the same conclusion. His move to relent on a shutdown only kicks the stalemate over federal spending to another day. Now it’s up to House Republicans to decide if McCarthy gets to stick around to resolve it.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

    Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

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    Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.

    An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.

    The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”

    Read: Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers

    It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.

    By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.

    McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.

    The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.

    The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”

    Annie Lowrey: Work requirements just won’t die

    McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.

    House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.

    A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.

    Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.

    The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.

    But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.

    The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.

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    Russell Berman

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  • This Debt Crisis Is Not Like 2011’s. It’s Worse.

    This Debt Crisis Is Not Like 2011’s. It’s Worse.

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    On its surface, the unfolding debt-ceiling crisis looks a lot like the confrontation in 2011 between congressional Republicans and then-President Barack Obama. Once again, a new GOP majority in the House is using the threat of a national default as leverage to force a first-term Democratic president to agree to spending cuts in exchange for lifting the federal borrowing limit. A first-ever default could crash the markets and trigger a recession. But, as in 2011, the two parties remain far apart, with a deadline to act approaching rapidly.

    Eric Cantor knows the feeling well. Twelve years ago, he was the House majority leader deputized by then-Speaker John Boehner to negotiate an agreement with Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president at the time. Cantor left Congress in 2014 after a stunning primary defeat that presaged the GOP’s anti-establishment, anti-immigration lurch toward Donald Trump two years later. He’s now a senior executive at a Wall Street investment bank.

    I called him up this week to ask what he had learned from the 2011 negotiations and how he sees today’s fight going. He warned that the risks of failure—and with it, economic calamity—are significantly greater this time around.

    Read: The logic behind Biden’s refusal to negotiate the debt ceiling

    Cantor and Biden failed to strike a deal on their own in 2011; that task ultimately fell to Biden and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. But Cantor told me he was impressed with Biden’s willingness to bargain: “He was very much in the mode of negotiating, compromising.”

    Not this time—Biden has rebuffed pleas from Speaker Kevin McCarthy for one-on-one negotiations. “President Biden is not the same person as Vice President Biden was,” Cantor said, a bit ruefully. Nor has Biden empowered anyone in his administration to bargain at all.

    “They’ve not negotiated a darn thing,” Cantor said.

    In 2011, Obama engaged with Republicans months in advance of the fiscal deadline, and the talks between Cantor and Biden, along with separate negotiations between Obama and Boehner, helped set parameters for the agreement that materialized when the nation was on the brink of default.

    The present lack of negotiations is likely a direct result of how things went back in 2011. Though both sides came to an agreement eventually, the near miss still caused a stock-market slide and the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating. When the U.S. bumped up against the debt ceiling again later in the Obama presidency, the administration was less inclined to negotiate—and a chastened GOP allowed the limit to be lifted without a fight. The lesson Democrats drew from that experience was never again to concede to the Republican premise that increasing the borrowing limit should be subject to legislative haggling.

    Biden’s no-negotiation stance, however, might not be sustainable. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed congressional leaders that the country would run out of fiscal wiggle room—afforded by the use of “extraordinary measures” that stretch federal funds—as soon as June 1. That deadline is earlier than many people in Washington expected, and Yellen’s warning injected fresh urgency into the effort to find a way out of the crisis. In response, Biden summoned McCarthy, McConnell, and their Democratic counterparts to a White House meeting next week.

    In 2011, McCarthy was one rung beneath Cantor in the House GOP hierarchy. Now, as speaker, he’s operating with a much thinner margin than Boehner and Cantor, who had more than 20 votes to spare. The GOP’s five-vote majority has less leverage, but it is more dug-in against the Democrats, and the speakership that McCarthy fought so hard to secure could be at risk if he were to allow the debt ceiling to be raised without extracting sufficient budget cuts or other concessions. The moderate dealmakers in the House Republican Conference have all but vanished. Boehner was ultimately forced out in 2015 by a conservative revolt, but he did not face the threat of an ouster that now hangs over McCarthy.

    Although McCarthy was able to muster enough votes last week to pass an opening bid through the House—“a huge victory,” Cantor told me—he’s unlikely to secure the same level of budget cuts that Republicans did in 2011. Obama and Boehner had traded proposals for entitlement cuts and tax increases, and the deal Congress eventually passed triggered $1.2 trillion in spending reductions over a 10-year period. Under pressure from former President Donald Trump, McCarthy isn’t even pushing this time for cuts to Medicare or Social Security. The likeliest solution, according to potential congressional dealmakers, is an agreement that would merely slow the growth of federal spending, not reverse it. “You’re just not going to move the needle as far,” Cantor said.

    Cantor remains in touch with McCarthy; the two, along with the Republican who succeeded Boehner as speaker, Paul Ryan, were once a conservative triumvirate known as the “Young Guns” (they were already in their 40s, but this is Congress), who rose quickly in the House GOP. When I asked him whether it was possible for McCarthy to emerge victorious in the eyes of his party, Cantor seemed doubtful. “Look, he’s got a very, very slim majority,” he said. “And given where conservative media and social media is on the issue, it’s just hard to be able to create a situation where you can declare a win and have everyone go along with it.”

    Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option

    For now, Cantor said, McCarthy is doing what he needs to do to give himself space to negotiate. “Kevin has demonstrated a will to fight, and I think that’s the most important thing right now for members to see—he’s willing to go to bat for them and fight,” he said. “So he comes into this with a fair amount of capital to work with.”

    Biden is also in fighting mode at the moment, in contrast to his bargaining mode in 2011. Cantor argued that “ironically,” Biden had more authority to hammer out a deal when he was Obama’s lieutenant than he does now. “He’s captive of the extreme left and the progressives in his party,” he said.

    This is mostly spin from a Republican who remains, even in his political retirement, a party loyalist. And Biden would surely dispute the suggestion that he would cut a deal with Republicans if left to his own devices; he came away from the 2011 experience with the same determination as others in his party not to negotiate again over the debt ceiling. But Cantor’s point is that because progressives are more ascendant now than they were then, Biden has less room to maneuver, especially as he launches a reelection bid for which he’ll need the left’s enthusiastic support.

    Cantor offered a couple of scenarios for how Biden and McCarthy could avert a default. The most likely involves Washington’s favorite fallback, the punt: Republicans would agree to a short-term increase in the debt ceiling in exchange for Biden committing to serious fiscal negotiations later in the year, when both sides would face a harder deadline. They could also reach a broader agreement in the next few weeks, but Cantor did not sound particularly hopeful. “I still don’t think we go into default,” the veteran of congressional brinkmanship told me, “but I think the path is certainly narrower, and the options available to either side are narrower.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • How Moderate Republicans Became an Endangered Species

    How Moderate Republicans Became an Endangered Species

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    Early this summer, the federal government will, in all likelihood, exhaust the “extraordinary measures” it is now employing to keep paying the nation’s bills. As the country careens toward that fiscal abyss, Congress will face a now-familiar stalemate: Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to cut spending. Democrats will balk. Markets will slide—perhaps precipitously—and the economy will swiftly turn south.

    When that moment arrives, the most important people in Washington won’t be those who work in the White House, or even the party leaders who occupy the Capitol’s most palatial offices. They will be the House Republicans who sit closest to the political center: the so-called moderates. The GOP’s majority is narrow enough that any five Republicans could dash Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s plan to demand a ransom for the debt ceiling. They will have to decide whether to stand with him or join with Democrats to avert a first-ever default on the nation’s debt.

    “Those guys will be called on to save the day,” says former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who, until his retirement in 2018, was one of the House’s most prominent moderates.

    Yascha Mounk: How moderates won the midterms

    Dent is talking about Republicans such as Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, whose Omaha district voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020. Bacon is a leader of the faction of Republicans hoping to serve as a counterweight to the House Freedom Caucus and the far-right hard-liners who extracted all manner of concessions from McCarthy earlier this month in exchange for allowing him to become speaker. During the four days of voting that McCarthy endured, Bacon regularly held court with reporters outside the House chamber, castigating the holdouts as the “chaos caucus” and comparing them to the Taliban.

    Bacon, a 59-year-old former Air Force commander first elected in 2016, styles himself as a pragmatist and a realist, and he is keenly aware of the sway that he and other like-minded Republicans could have. Indeed, he and his allies have already blocked two bills backed by some on the far right—including a measure to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent sales tax—from coming up for a vote. But don’t call him a moderate. “I’d rather be called a conservative who gets things done,” Bacon told me.

    In rejecting the moderate label, Bacon is no different than the other 221 Republicans now serving in the House, virtually all of whom describe themselves as some version of conservative. As the party has moved to the right, so, too, has its leftmost flank. The decline of the GOP moderate is a story more than two decades in the making, but it carries particular significance at a moment when centrist lawmakers could wield so much power. If they choose to use it. If they exist at all anymore.

    Two years ago, Bacon picked up the discarded flag of a dormant GOP group called the Main Street Caucus. The caucus is the House extension of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a political organization founded 25 years ago by then-Representative Amo Houghton of New York. The original Main Street Partnership was explicitly, and proudly, moderate; Houghton called himself a “militant moderate,” and the group’s aim was to “serve as a voice for centrist Republicans,” as well as to soften the GOP’s harsh rhetoric and policies on abortion, gay rights, and the environment, among other issues.

    The Partnership remains active—it spent $25 million in support of Republican candidates last year—but it has rebranded itself to stay relevant in today’s GOP. Searching through its website history on the Internet Archive, I found that the Partnership dropped the words moderate and centrist from its mission statement sometime in the fall of 2011, shortly after the last new Republican House majority forced a confrontation over the debt ceiling with a Democratic president. They’ve since been replaced by more generic descriptors, such as common sense and pragmatic.

    “We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate,” says Sarah Chamberlain, the Partnership’s CEO and a former aide to Houghton (who retired from Congress in 2004 and died in 2020). Its members now identify as “pragmatic conservatives.” “The entity from day one has the same name, but it looks very different,” Chamberlain told me.

    David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning

    The Main Street Caucus isn’t the only congressional group whose members once might have identified as moderate. Others include the Republican Governance Group (formerly known as the Tuesday Group) and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. A couple dozen Republicans, including Bacon, are members of all three groups. But they each eschew the word, in part, Bacon explained to me, because in primaries “it’s used as a cudgel.”

    Another reason is they are simply more conservative than their predecessors. As Republicans who embraced the moderate label, including Dent, have left Congress over the past 20 years, the Republicans replacing them have moved ever further from the political center. Many of the original members of the Tuesday Group and the Main Street Partnership, for example, backed abortion rights; Dent, who left the House five years ago, told me he believed he was either the last, or one of the last, House Republicans to hold that position.

    Earlier this month, the Main Street Caucus—the largest of the three groups, with about 60 members—elected as its chair a Republican even more conservative than Bacon, Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota. When I spoke with him by phone, Johnson eagerly volunteered that both he and the group’s new vice chair, Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, earned higher ratings than the average House Republican on the scorecard kept by Heritage Action, the conservative activist group that has warred with GOP moderates for years. “We are members who overwhelmingly want to deliver policy wins—conservative policy wins,” Johnson told me.

    The big question now is whether the GOP’s self-identified pragmatists will stand up to—or simply behind—the party leadership in the fiscal battles to come. During the speakership fight, Johnson, Bacon, and other pragmatists served as McCarthy’s protective guard, staring down the GOP holdouts by declaring that they would vote for no one other than McCarthy. Yet, with only a few complaints, they largely blessed the concessions the new speaker made to empower the far right at his own expense.

    Bacon assured me that he and his fellow pragmatists will use the leverage they have, noting the two bills that they had already prevented from coming for a vote. On the debt-ceiling debate, however, many of the deal-seeking Republicans are sounding like McCarthy, who has said the president must endorse spending cuts in order to lift the borrowing limit. “We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling until we have some additional fiscal responsibility returned to spending in this town,” Johnson told me. He put the onus on Biden and the Democrats to negotiate, equating their refusal to do so with “choosing the path of legislative terrorism.” Other members of the Main Street Caucus struck a slightly more malleable tone. “We have to be aggressive on spending, and it’s something I ran for Congress on, so I’m comfortable with that,” Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told me. “But we also have to continue to be able to govern.”

    The primary mechanism that the pragmatic Republicans could use to bypass McCarthy is a discharge petition, which would force a vote on increasing the debt limit. Given the GOP’s narrow lead in the House, only five Republicans would need to join Democrats to get the requisite support. (One GOP leader of the Problem Solvers Caucus, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, mentioned this as a possibility when the hard-liners were blocking McCarthy’s path to speaker.) “It would be very difficult for me to sign a discharge petition against leadership,” Armstrong told me. “I would never say never, but I would be very, very skeptical that I would ever sign that.” Yet in the next breath, Armstrong suggested that if the stock market were crashing, that could change his mind: “I’m not cratering every senior in my district’s 401(k). I’m not doing it.”

    Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option

    A discharge petition is an imperfect vehicle for resolving a debt-ceiling crisis; because of the House’s procedural rules, gathering signatures would have to begin weeks or even months in advance. In 2015, Dent helped lead a bipartisan coalition in using a discharge petition to go around the GOP leadership to pass legislation reviving the Export-Import Bank, a federal credit agency that conservatives wanted to let die. Then-Speaker John Boehner had already announced his departure, having been ushered into retirement by a far-right revolt. “Ordinarily, the speaker would be pretty upset about it. I can assure you he was not,” Dent recalled.

    A dozen years ago, it was Boehner leading a House GOP majority bent on securing spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. After several rounds of negotiations failed—including an attempted “grand bargain” on taxes and entitlement programs with then-President Barack Obama—Congress agreed to form a “super committee” to put in place budget caps that became known as sequestration. (Congress would later prevent many of these caps from being put in place.)

    Dent predicted that Republicans would win few if any concessions from Democrats for raising the borrowing limit this time around. “You’re going to get something close to a clean debt-ceiling bill,” he told me. Perhaps Biden will agree to form a fiscal commission to propose possible spending cuts, Washington’s favorite face-saving punt. A fig leaf, in other words. Bacon told me he’s hoping for something more, such as a commitment to keep increases in federal spending below inflation. “I’d like to see more than a fig leaf. I’d like to at least see some underwear on.”

    What’s all but certain is that a significant chunk of the House Republican conference won’t go for that kind of deal. Republicans told me that they doubt the party could pass any debt-ceiling increase on its own, and many conservatives might reject any deal that McCarthy could get Democrats to endorse, if he can get Democrats to negotiate at all. That will put the pressure once again on the GOP’s pragmatists, the Republicans who pass for moderate in 2023 but won’t dare use that word. If and when the debt crisis comes, they could well be the ones deciding between, well, moderation and default.

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    Russell Berman

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