Every now and then, the United States is given an exciting opportunity to shut down the government or default on our debt. All Congress has to do is raise the debt ceiling (in effect, agreeing to spend money to pay debts they’ve already agreed to—it sounds unnecessary because it is) or enact an appropriation bill (which, basically, authorizes the government to spend money to keep running) to save our country from literal economic demise, but as we’ve seen over this last year, that often comes frighteningly close to not happening.
In the late spring of this year, we came very close to a debt default that would have been catastrophic, unprecedented, horrific. At the last second, Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House at the time, cut a deal with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling for two years, saving the reputation of the nation’s treasury and making Republicans livid. And just recently, the government was on the brink of shutting down if an appropriations bill wasn’t passed, which didn’t look like it was going to happen. (For context: the government has shut down ten times in its history, each time costing the government significant amounts of money; this time, political analysts deemed it unlikely that a shutdown would initiate an immediate recession—but unlikely and impossible are two very different words, and even the possibility of a recession should stir Congress to immediate action).
But then Kevin McCarthy did something unexpected: he put his political aspirations aside—a difficult feat for today’s power-obsessed politicians—and created a budget resolution that could attract both reasonably-moderate Democrats and Republicans. This angered the far-far-far-right members of the House Freedom Caucus, who couldn’t believe that he had negotiated with Democrats and felt that they couldn’t trust him. They introduced a resolution to remove him from the position of Speaker of the House: a vote was held, and he was promptly removed—despite having a 9-seat majority in Congress. The third-highest-ranking democratically-elected official in the United States was removed from his job because of his commitment to keep the country from a possible recession.
You could say our country’s in good hands.
To be clear, I’ve never been a fan of Kevin McCarthy. But while I may not like or agree with him, their stripping him of his seat in Congress because he had enough backbone to put millions of peoples’ interests above his own makes me really mad. It’s also a good picture of just how great the extremely far right’s chokehold on the House of Representatives is. The fact that it was even an option for us to default on our debt back in June, or to let the government shut down, shows how dysfunctional our government has become and how polarized both parties are.
Research has shown that party polarization in the United States is higher than it has been at any point in US history since the end of the Civil War. This is a scary fact in and of itself, but when we add that our governmental systems assume the cooperation of both parties, and without that cooperation (unless a party has a supermajority in both chambers of Congress), our government could send massive economic shockwaves around the entire world, it becomes terrifying.
In my mind, we have three ways out of this political catastrophe: we can change the laws that mandate that the debt ceiling be raised (in this same vein, if a situation gets especially dire, a president could argue that the Fourteenth Amendment—which requires that “all the government's financial obligations be met”—makes the debt ceiling void), we can somehow de-polarize our political parties (which, given the amount that social media has fed the fires of polarization, doesn’t seem likely or even possible), or we can default on our debt/ shut the government down.
Economic disaster isn’t an American norm (yet). But I’m scared that our country won’t put enough effort into averting the crisis we’ve found ourselves in, and that those in power placidly accept the United States’—and the world’s—economic demise.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.