[jeffreymcmanus]

The leadership can be aligned with whatever it wants; what matters is how they actually vote, and it's a fact that at the moment, the congressional leadership (as well as nearly all of their presidential candidates) is playing the tea party tune.

[protomyth]

If the leadership was playing the tea party tune, they would have gone with Ryan's spending cuts instead of the costly debt ceiling raise. The leadership is ignoring the tea parties desires and doing business as usual.

[jeffreymcmanus]

Making a credible threat to drive the global economy into a ditch is not even close to "business as usual".

[protomyth]

Even without a debt ceiling increase the US wouldn't have defaulted. There were a couple of plans to keep things going. The actions taken increase debt by a rather large amount, so I do believe it was meaningless theater which is pretty much business as usual.

[jeffreymcmanus]

That's just nonsense. There were no "plans to keep things going" -- if that were so, then whose plans were these, exactly, and why weren't those plans enacted?

If the default threat were really no big deal, why did the stock market plunge 15% during the Republican-engineered budget crisis? Clearly somebody thought it was a big deal, because it requires a hell of a lot of selling to make the market move like that.

The Republican congressional leadership stated outright that default was preferable to raising one penny of taxes to balance the budget. That's not "business as usual". It's arguably not even constitutional. But it's certainly never happened before in the history of the United States.

[protomyth]

Treasury keeps paying the debt service with the money that comes in. A lot of program stop getting funded (including, strangely, a couple of taxes). A couple of freedom of information act requests to treasury got the fact there was a plan, but only 17 pages were actually released (which didn't tell a whole lot).

A default would be a huge deal, but not passing the debt ceiling increase doesn't automatically equal a default. The leadership wanted to pass an increase (that is pretty clear from their rejection of some of the more honest spending cut packages), they also are being pressured to not raise taxes but cut spending. The final deal was not what any tea party house member or senator wanted.

"It's arguably not even constitutional" - The Congress is in charge of the budget per the US Constitution, not the President. The US Constitution evens goes as far as saying where such bills must start (Article I, Section 7, clause 1).

[jeffreymcmanus]

> not passing the debt ceiling increase doesn't automatically equal a default

Sorry, that's what everybody in government was saying during the manufactured crisis. If you have some kind of insider information that contradicts what everyone in government was saying, then produce it. Otherwise, it sounds like you're making up facts to fit an agenda (quoting the constitution is a common symptom of this).