Biden has been wildly successful in not letting the debt crisis go to waste | Opinion

With the possible exception of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden’s inept leadership was never more vividly on display than during the current crisis over raising the federal government’s debt ceiling.

Week after week Biden refused to negotiate with the leadership of the GOP-led U.S. House, which responsibly voted to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, but also asked for reasonable reductions in the federal government’s runaway spending.

Then, with the government lurching toward a June 1 deadline and an outcome that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned could create a financial catastrophe with far-reaching consequences around the world, Biden cut short an overseas trip and returned to the White House — allegedly to negotiate.

Unfortunately, Biden’s position — that the debt ceiling (and taxes on the wealthy) need to be raised so that the government can keep on spending at its current unsustainable pace — resembles the position of a man who demands a lung transplant so he can keep on smoking three packs a day.

It’s as though Biden fondly recalls an axiom — “Never let a crisis go to waste” — that was popular in the early days of the Obama White House, which had inherited a housing-market collapse, a Wall Street meltdown and a deepening recession.

In that earlier crisis, the Obama administration — with the help of the news media — was able attribute the problems to Wall Street’s greed and to the policies of George W. Bush rather than to their actual origin: the Clinton administration’s 1995 changes to the Community Reinvestment Act, which incentivized lenders to make risky mortgage loans.

Meanwhile, at this point in the current crisis, even if Biden belatedly relented and agreed to approve some modest spending cuts that didn’t affect vote-buying attempts such as appropriating taxpayers’ money to pay off deadbeat students’ college loans, it may be too little, too late.

That’s because any compromise that the White House’s recalcitrance forces on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would be just the end of the beginning of a complex process, not the beginning of the end of the debt crisis.

McCarthy would still need to go back to the House, where he leads a fragile Republican majority whose control of the chamber requires the continued presence of — and approval from — kooks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, alleged crooks such as George Santos and members of the House Freedom Caucus, that little gaggle of ideologues where Ron DeSantis hung out while he was in Congress.

Who could’ve imagined that this iteration of the House would be acting more responsibly than this president? Biden’s threat to use the 14th Amendment to assert that he can bypass Congress on the debt ceiling is unlikely to pass muster in the courts but is likely to make investors wary of lending money to the U.S. government.

Then there’s the Democrat-led Senate, which has yet to act on the debt ceiling in any way except to send Sen. Chuck Schumer to a lectern to peer over his glasses during a press conference and complain about Republicans’ actions. It’s not exactly a good way to engender the bipartisan goodwill that will be required to amass enough GOP support to get a plan through the Senate’s procedural challenges on time.

Similarly, throughout this crisis, the statements of White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre have been highly partisan and unconstructive — and presumably representative of the president’s viewpoints.

If congressional inaction even temporarily renders the federal government unable to pay its bills — including outlays for salaries such as those of our military, air traffic controllers, TSA agents, the FBI, and thousands of others on the federal payroll — expect an immediate backlash and, possibly, strikes and other kinds of protests.

Even worse, if Social Security recipients do not receive the monthly payments that are a lifeline for many retirees, expect to see media interviews with sobbing elders, followed by President Biden’s statements blaming it all on the GOP-led House.

There’s a bitter irony in that because the House and Yellen’s Treasury Department have been the only Washington entities — legislative, executive or otherwise — that responsibly took timely action to avert a fiscal crisis and similar crises in the decade ahead.

If the federal government nonetheless misses the looming deadline, defaults on its debts for the first time in the nation’s history, damages the value of the dollar and makes it harder for the United States to get preferential interest rates on its future borrowing, no doubt Biden and his fellow Democrats will seek political gain as an election year approaches and find a way to ensure that this crisis that they themselves caused does not go to waste.