Rules of Thumb for the Twenty-first century: Don’t pay off blackmailers and don’t negotiate with terrorists. If you pay off a blackmailer—he just comes back with more and harsher demands. If you negotiate with terrorists or meet their demands to release hostages—they take more hostages. Which McConnell (R-KY) ADMITTED more than a decade ago when a reporter asked him about a similar debt-ceiling blackmail effort in 2012: “What we did learn is this – it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”
When Republicans refer to “debt limits” and “debt ceilings,” they are using scam terms—double-speak for holding our economy hostage to force deeply unpopular cuts to Social Security, Medicare, nutrition, housing, and health programs that Republicans cannot achieve through the normal democratic process.
No other nation in the world permits this kind of economic blackmail by a small minority of legislators. Nowhere else does a government legally establish programs and legally fund them and then entitle a small caucus of extremist legislators to threaten the world economy with catastrophe as a way of extorting crippling funding cuts. In the words of Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman: “A party that barely controls one house of Congress shouldn’t get to impose deeply unpopular policies on the nation as a whole.”
It’s time to stop granting legitimacy to a scam based on lies, stop negotiating with blackmailers, and stop making deals to appease extortionists. It’s time for Democrats to start playing hardball with right-wing MAGA extremists. There are at least six hardball tactics Democrats can (and should) use to counter Republican blackmail rather than giving in to their extortion demands:
- Enforce the 14th Amendment by ignoring the debt-ceiling law rather than defaulting on payments.
- Repeal, amend, or suspend Gingrich’s 1995 debt-ceiling law.
- Cut fraud, waste, and boondoggles from the Pentagon budget before cutting Social Security.
- Replace current Treasury bonds with higher-yield premium bonds.
- Have the Treasury mint trillion-dollar coins to create countervailing economic assets on the books.
- Use a Discharge Petition to circumvent MAGA-controlled House committees and force a floor vote.
We elect our government to govern responsibly in the interests of We the People. That’s their job. Negotiating with economic terrorists and paying off extortionists is not what we elected our representatives to do.
Contact your Members of Congress and President Biden and tell them: do not make deals with economic terrorists!
Final week to vote by mail in ADEMS
The California Democratic Party’s Assembly Delegate Election Meetings are happening now, and the deadline to vote by mail is January 31. Read more about the ADEMs on our blog.
If you registered to vote by mail, you may already have your ballot by now. CADem has instructions on filling out your ballot, and lists of the candidates for AD 17, AD 19, and all the Assembly districts in California.
We don’t have any endorsements for this election. In AD 17, there are two slates. We’ll post any progressive endorsements on our Vote page.
If you’re interested in participating in activities like drafting letters to our Members of Congress and developing our strategy for influencing them, the Indivisible SF Federal Working Group is where it happens.
Indivisible SF Federal Working Group: Thursday, January 26, 7:30–9 PM. Planning meeting where we discuss strategy to influence our Members of Congress and the Biden administration to enact a progressive agenda. Meeting starts promptly at 7:30 PM. All are welcome. Register here!
About this week’s photo
If you’ve seen our newsletter posts on Twitter and Facebook, you might have noticed that we include a photo or graphic with each issue.
Today’s image is a photo of the two statues of the Peace Monument in front of the Capitol dome used in a WSJ article about the debt ceiling fight in the House. The photo was taken by J. Scott Applewhite for Associated Press.
Keep Fighting,The Indivisible SF Team
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