By now you’ve heard that Senator John Kerry (D-MA) was on NBC’s "Meet The Press" yesterday morning and tried to lay the blame for the decision by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) to downgrade our nation’s credit rating on the Tea Party. I posted the video clip earlier here if you haven't seen it.
Others have been attempting to blame the Tea Party as well. For instance, Democrat National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said of John Kerry’s assertion, “truer words [have] never been spoken,” and went on to call the Tea Party “tyrants.”
President Obama’s political mastermind David Axelrod said “this is essentially a Tea Party downgrade.”
These statements are asinine. This is nothing more than politically motivated deceit without regard to any historical facts. Without having to right a book on why a “Tea Party downgrade” is perhaps one of the most ridiculous statements conceived for political consumption, I’ll make only one point and leave it for you to decide for yourself: Who insisted for months that the debt ceiling be lifted by $2.4 trillion through the end of the next election, without a single cut in spending?
Democrats, from President Barack Obama on down, repeatedly requested a debt limit increase, without any spending cuts attached.
April 11, 2011: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney - “Without negotiating from here I will say that we support -- we believe that we should move quickly to raise the debt limit and we support a clean piece of legislation to do that.” (Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Briefing By Press Secretary Jay Carney,” The White House, 4/11/11)
April 14, 2011: “Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday he wants a clean vote to raise the debt ceiling.” (Meredith Shiner, “Harry Reid Calls For Clean Debt Ceiling Vote,” Politico, 4/14/11)
April 18, 2011: “114 House of Representatives Democrats--more than half the party's 192-strong caucus--Monday wrote party leaders, asking that a debt ceiling bill be passed without any strings attached.” (David Lightman, “Democrats Want Clean Debt Limit Legislation,” McClatchy’s Planet Washington, 4/18/11)
May 11, 2011: “Linking efforts to reduce long-term federal deficits with a congressional vote to raise the government’s debt limit puts U.S. credit at risk, President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser told a Chicago audience. ‘To tie this to the debt limit is, in my view, quite insane,’ Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said today to the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders.” (John McCormick, “Goolsbee Says Tying Debt Ceiling To Spending Is ‘Quite Insane,” Bloomberg, 5/11/11)
The problem with a “clean” raise of the debt limit ceiling is that S&P, as well as others, would have downgraded our credit rating anyway. The fact of the matter is, if not for Tea Party freshman and fiscal conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats would have passed their record-setting debt ceiling hike without any cuts… just like they did when they cheered their party-line vote in February 2010 to rise what was then a record setting debt hike of $1.9 trillion.
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